FLOOR

Research Group: Social security as a human right, 2010–2013. The global construction and diffusion of civic minima (FLOOR = Financial assistance, land policy, and global social rights), partly funded by DFG

Principal investigators: Benjamin Davy, Ulrike Davy, Lutz Leisering

The research group FLOOR aimed to advance the new field of research ‚Global Social Policy‘ in theoretical, empirical, and methodological terms from an interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing law, sociology, and land policy studies. The group comprised three research projects:

• the project ‚Social rights – Towards a global human right to a civic minimum‘ (principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Ulrike Davy, Faculty of Law, Institute for World Society Studies, Bielefeld University)
• the project  ‚Social cash transfers – The global construction and diffusion of the right to a monetary minimum‘ (principle investigator: Prof. Lutz Leisering PhD, Faculty of Sociology, Institute for World Society Studies, Bielefeld University)
• the project ‚Socio-ecological land policy‘ (principle investigator: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Davy, School of Spatial Planning, Dortmund University of Technology).

Additionally, FLOOR was associated with a cooperation group funded by the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF) in Bielefeld.

The FLOOR group started from the assumption that social policy and, even more, the ‚welfare state‘ are concepts which originated in European nation states, expressing a formal responsibility of governments for individual welfare. We asked: Can we expect that social policy in this sense will also emerge in the global arena, even in the face of cultural diversity, social inequalities, poverty, economic globalisation, and the absence of a world state? Hence, we were particularly interested in what can be called the rise of global social policy: What does ‚global social policy‘ mean? What is ‚global‘, and what is ‚social‘ in global social policy? For our studies we chose social security as a key field of social policy, especially basic social security which is a test case because it represents the moral minimum in social welfare (‚social floor‘): Is there a global social minimum?

We assumed that three forms of basic social security have gained importance in world politics in recent years, but are under-researched and normally not analysed together: social rights in a human rights context; social cash transfers; and socio-ecological land policy which aims to secure access to vital land use by individuals. The overarching question was whether the move towards a global social floor in these three dimensions could be seen as a step towards global social citizenship.

For further information on the research group and the projects, see: www.floorgroup.de