Southern Regional Organisations and Pro-Poor Goals

Although regional organisations are moving away from market-based goals to embrace issues of welfare and social development, little is known of the role they can play in the formation of policy conducive to embedding alternative approaches to development into national and international strategies.

Now, in a PRARI working paper, Regional Integration and Poverty: How Do Southern Regionalisms Embed Norms and Practices of Social Development through Health Governance and Diplomacy? Pía Riggirozzi explores how southern regional organisations and regionalisms as advanced by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are framing and advancing pro-poor norms and goals.

Her analysis focuses on the specific area of health to argue that southern regional organisations, while neglected partners in global governance of development, can promote and prescribe standards for social development and poverty reduction and act as forum for the advocacy of equity and rights.

The paper was first presented at the conference Southern Regionalisms, Global Agendas: Innovating Inclusive Access to Health and Medicines in a Context of Social Inequity held at the OU in December.

PRARI have also published Measuring Regional Policy Change and Pro-Poor Health Policy Success: A PRARI Toolkit of Indicators for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which they hope will be used in the monitoring of regional health policy by SADC stakeholders. The toolkit, which used a participatory method in developing its indicators, focuses on three diseases that have a conspicuous incidence on the poor and most vulnerable groups.

The PRARI research project is exploring the scope to enhance the effectiveness of regional alliances in tackling global poverty and promoting socially equitable, inclusive development, with reference to two regions: South America and Southern Africa. You can watch a brief introduction from Professor Nicola Yeates (Principal Investigator) in Wiping Out Poverty in the Global South.

Read Regional Integration and Poverty: How Do Southern Regionalisms Embed Norms and Practices of Social Development through Health Governance and Diplomacy?

Read Measuring Regional Policy Change And Pro-Poor Health Policy Success: A Prari Toolkit of Indicators for the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Watch Wiping Out Poverty in the Global South.