Social protection in Tunisia: An example of the decline of the welfare state

This piece came out of a series of webinars titled “Social Protection after Social Distancing” organized by the Arab Hub for Social Protection from COVID-19. The first session was about the emergence and evolution of the notion of social protection in the Arab world.

The welfare state, social protection state and other labels tell of a state’s identity and its social attitude toward citizens and in how it legitimizes its existence as a political entity. The social welfare system is first and foremost a political matter — it is the most notable component of the social contract forged between the state and the citizenry. The social protection paradigm is one aimed at keeping risks within bounds and under as tight a control as possible, as well as maintaining the necessary balance so that citizens are content with said social contract and its life is extended.

Every social welfare system is a universal system pertinent to everyone without exception, meaning that it is concerned with all citizens in the face of all sorts of risk. But within this system, that seeks to be universal, attention may be given to select groups and not others — for example, care is targeted at the poor and the marginalized. Everyone understands, in this case, that the purpose of any and every economic development and growth of wealth is to curb poverty and keep the number of impoverished individuals as low as possible. Alleviating poverty is done in a context like that of Tunisia through fighting unemployment, popular housing programs and slum clearance programs. These efforts signal the state’s desire to eliminate signs of the rift between the political rhetoric deployed by the state and the lived reality of the poor and the needy.

Under such circumstances, the social protection system becomes a tool for symbolic and political dominance by the state. It plays a role in political control and in manufacturing civic peace. Benefits are viewed by the public as spoils distributed by the state to its subjects. Thus, social protection — particularly, the poverty alleviation aspect of it — has occurred through local patronage as well as personal networks and where they deem social bargains to lie. The general public, on the other hand, have taken to approaching the system through its many loopholes, including corruption, which has enabled ineligible individuals to sit at the top of government assistance recipient lists.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the Tunisian state set out to take accurate inventory of individuals in real need of intervention, but was met with immense challenges. The difficulty stems from a lack of adequate mechanisms for monitoring and public accountability, a role typically played by civil society organizations. These challenges speak of the problems of the social protection apparatus in the state today. 

Tunisia’s social protection system is one of the longer-established ones in the Arab region. It was first introduced in 1898 under French colonization to tend to the welfare of Tunisia-based French and foreign subjects. Tunisians at large were never beneficiaries of that system. But the independence state salvaged it, taking advantage of rich experience and a wealth of legal and technical provisions — and extended it to professionals, imposing on them mandatory contributions to social funds established for this purpose. The Tunisian state has largely succeeded at including everyone in this system. Legal coverage was at 87.4 percent in 2004, with 76.9 percent of the active labor force covered. These figures show that the state is keen on playing a significant role in social protection, one of the most important components of the social contract.

The trade union movement has also helped ensure Tunisians have access to an overall just social protection system. A steady balance has always been maintained between the state and the trade union institution to ensure the rights of workers in both the public and private sectors. These conditions have yielded understandings where the two parties conduct a review of social protection provisions every three years. This remained the case throughout the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century.

But major changes to the global economy and society pushed many states, including Tunisia, to roll back welfare and social protections. The country may have stepped into a minimal state model, where the government seeks to shed its traditional functions to be picked up by third-party actors. State-run social protection funds are facing more and more financial difficulties and possibly the threat of running dry. The outcome of years of bureaucracy and unsound governance, the Tunisian state has, to this day, been unable to solve this predicament. For years, these social funds have been a saving grace at every liquidity shortage. To make matters worse, Tunisia has clearly been headed toward an aging population; the number of enrolled workers, in both the public and private sectors, has been declining, while unemployment rises; and the economy has been experiencing great shrinkage over the current decade.

Considering the history at hand and facing these developments, discussion of the social protection system bifurcates into conversations about several other issues. Recent major social transformations, such as the steady emergence of a society of individuals, for instance, have a bearing on what social protection means. Societies are no longer looking for social integration through state institutions and institutions of socialization and social support, like they used to in the last century. Such institutions that provided all sorts of social protection are shrinking and degrading. Reasons vary between poor governance and mismanagement, and these institutions’ inability to keep up with rapid social transformations. They were built to meet now-outdated needs and are unable to develop new dynamics from within themselves.

The question before us now is: How do individuals fit into social protection systems? Will we remain in the confines of professional associations? What about religious, ethnic and other minorities, displaced communities, and stateless and undocumented persons?

These are pressing questions because the notion of social protection has come to encompass more than its traditional elements of health and education, important as they still are. Social protection may nowadays be connected to the state of the environment, for example, and to all that pertains to the quality of life. Cultural rights, in all their different dimensions, may also be another element in need of social protection of some sort.

These and other questions can open up new horizons for us to more extensively study social protection and the various systems through which it is carried out, especially in light of the considerable changes brought about by the pandemic and those to come after. Questions about the well-being of the human race are likely to be bigger and deeper than anything we have known. Perhaps the one thing we know for certain is that COVID-19 has exposed the frailty and decay of social protection systems in most countries, regardless of how advanced they may be.

Mohamed Gowaily is a professor of sociology at Tunis University