Roti, kapda, makaan; bijli, sadak, paani; and shiksha, swaasthya, suraksha. These familiar phrases in public policy discourse have long set the standard for what social protection means in the Indian context. While these ideas have remained stable in their normative orientation, their meanings and policy expressions have evolved significantly over time. This paper argues that institutional stability and change in social protection policy in India are best explained through the explanatory power of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse. However, traditional institutionalist theories, whether rational choice, sociological, or historical, tend to underplay the role of ideas and discourse as drivers of institutional stability and change. This paper therefore turns to Discursive Institutionalism, the fourth and most recent variant of New Institutionalism conceptualised by Vivien Schmidt, to examine how ideas and discourse interact to shape social protection policy in India. The analysis finds that together, the three trinities reveal a progressive reorientation in the conception of social protection in India: from provision, to building, to enabling. Their persistence across decades of political and institutional change is evidence not of institutional inertia but of the explanatory power of ideas and the interactive processes of discourse: as the normative implication of these ideas is made explicit and institutionally embedded over time, these ideas define what is expected, what is legitimate, and what is possible in public policy.
The full paper is available here
