Social contract

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The Concept of the “Social Contract”

The term “social contract” is seeing increasing use in academic and journalistic texts – and by international organisations (see below) – to describe state-society relations. Amongst other things, it helps to analyse

  • why some social groups are socially, politically or economically better off than others;
  • why some revolt and demand a new social contract;
  • why some countries descend into violent conflict;
  • how foreign actors – e.g. external donors – can influence state-society relations by strengthening the government or certain social groups.


Nevertheless, the term has remained insufficiently conceptualised, and its potential for comparing and analysing state-society relations in various countries has been underutilised.

A research and advisory project by the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) is therefore working on developing the concept further and facilitating its use by researchers and policymakers. The project defines the social contract as the “entirety of explicit or implicit agreements between all relevant societal groups and the sovereign (i.e. the government or any other actor in power), defining their rights and obligations towards each other” (Loewe, Zintl and Houdret 2020). Social contracts have the following main features: (i) their scope, (ii) their content (reciprocal commitments by governments and social groups), and (iii) their temporal dimension.

The project, which is being funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), is focusing on countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, amongst others. After independence, these countries saw the emergence of highly specific social contracts based on the redistribution of external rents (from natural resources and other sources) paid to the state. Governments provided subsidised food and energy, free education and public-sector jobs to citizens in exchange for their tacit recognition of the regimes’ legitimacy, despite almost a complete lack of political participation. As populations grew and state revenues fell, however, governments became less and less able to fulfil their duties, a situation that ultimately sparked the 2011 protests in the Arab countries.

Publications on the concept of the social contract

An abridged version of IDOS' concept was published in German, English, French and Arabic in 2019 in four languages as part of the “Briefing Papers” series:

 

The same series also includes policy papers with conclusions that development cooperation (DC) can draw from the concept of the social contract:

 

A detailed version of the concept was released as the introduction to a special issue in World Development:

 

The following essays also appeared in the same special issue:

 

Two essays deal with the question of what expectations citizens in the Arab world have of social contracts in their countries:

 

Several opinion papers deal with the question of the consequences for international cooperation of analysing it from the perspective of the social contract:

Empirical publications

Several papers (two of which appear in the World Development special issue mentioned above) analyse selected policy areas with significant potential for reform. They look at what measures in each area could help make the existing social contracts in the MENA countries acceptable to larger sections of the population and thus more stable and sustainable overall:

Reception of the concept in development policy

International cooperation organisations are also increasingly using the concept of the social contract to gain a better conceptual grasp of developments in the MENA region and reshape their own work. The IDOS MENA team has therefore also been asked to support the World Bank and the OECD. For example, the following report has been written with the assistance of IDOS:

 

The OECD has held two annual meetings of the MENA-OECD Economic Resilience Task Force with help of IDOS: one in 2018 in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) and the other in 2019 in Berlin (Germany).

Working on behalf of the BMZ, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) is also currently preparing an analysis of Germany’s portfolio of development cooperation with Middle Eastern countries, using the concept of the social contract formulated by the IDOS.

 

But the IDOS concept of the social contract was also received with interest in the MENA countries. The branch of Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) has been using the IDOS concept in its advisory services since 2020, and the governments of Jordan and Morocco have also shown interest. In addition, the concept was strongly adopted by the Stabilization Support Unit (SSU), which deals with future development in Syria, at its fourth political conference in Gaziantep (Turkey), which took place in the framework of the phase "Social Contract for the Future Syria" and focused on the participation of the Syrian local communities in the political processes in Syria:

Aspirations of the Syrian local communities for a NEW Syrian Social Contract
Conference organised by the Stabilisation Support Unit (SSU),
Gaziantep, Turkey, 27 October 2022

Events

IDOS also brought the issue through organised panels at several international conferences - such as:

 

The IDOS organised an academic conference in Bonn on the future of social contracts in the MENA countries on its own initiative in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at the University of Bath:

 

And six years later, a scientific workshop followed to discuss the factors that can lead to changes, positive and negative, in social contracts:

Publications by other authors

The following publications are also relevant for the topic:

Contact

Photo: Markus Loewe is Economist and Senior Researcher in the Research programme "Transformation of Economic and Social Systems"

Markus Loewe

E-mail  Markus.Loewe@idos-research.de
Phone +49 (0)228 94927-154
Fax +49 (0)228 94927-130