Social policy development and its obstacles: An analysis of the South Asian welfare geography during and after the ‘social turn’

There have been increasing attempts to overcome the uneven country selection and social security bias within the ‘welfare modelling business.’ As such, studies increasingly discussed additional areas of social development and captured the unique processes of welfare policy change primarily in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. To date, South Asia has not been dealt with very systematically in this emerging literature. This chapter, therefore, offers an account of social policy development in five countries in South Asia – Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – from a comparative policy perspective.