Social protection in the mandate of the IMF

Social protection has arisen with remarkable speed on the global agenda. As part of this development many international organisations have adopted social protection policies to guide their policy-making. One of the most recent organisation to do so is the IMF, which in 2019 adopted a Strategy for Social Spending. Reception has been mixed. Whereas for some this indicates a long overdue sign of taking social responsibility seriously, for others this constitutes merely another attempt at whitewashing its neoliberal economic agenda. This article seeks to identify the notion of social spending as invoked by the IMF, and to contextualise it with reference to the mandate of the Fund. The article claims that the increasing engagement with social protection inevitably brings the IMF into a discourse on the concept and form of that protection. As social protection is strongly embedded in a rights-based approach, the article therefore asks to what extent IMF social protection engagement can be thought of as promotion of human rights.