Teaching about global social policy

Global social policy as a newly emerging field dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s at the time when globalisation was becoming a key concern in the social sciences. Global social policy in its original formulation was an important call to both theorise and research empirically key global and transnational actors and international organisations. Since then, a huge body of knowledge has been produced on the role of the UN, ILO, World Bank, IMF, GATT, OECD and others in terms of regulation, redistribution and provision. These studies have highlighted the role these global actors have in terms of both policy influence and policy instrumentation, in terms of their discursive powers, and crucially, the ways in which these powerful actors have a major role in representation, governing and knowledge production. Teaching global social policy requires a careful scaffolding of both interdisciplinary course content as well as critical skills that enable students to analyse and decode competing knowledge claims.