Do social assistance programs respond to the needs of male- and female-headed households differently? It is well-known that economic shocks and some market conditions could have differential impact on men and women (World Bank 2012). However, there is less known about how the application of social protection varies by gender. A large literature has examined the effectiveness of individual policies and schemes, some of which take account of gender differences (Duflo 2012), but the overall patterns of social assistance have hardly been studied in this respect. Understanding the gender differences in the provision of social assistance is important particularly because men and women use their resources differently. As a result, differential treatments could be more or less welfare-enhancing depending on who receives the assistance. In this paper, we focus on the case of Iran and take a step to assess the ways in which social assistance to households varies by household characteristics, particularly the gender of the head of household. The case of Iran is interesting to study because social transfers in Iran have been substantial and the country’s income distribution has been improving since the early 1990s. So, it is important to explore how social aid resources have been allocated to households and what impact they have had on spending and distribution. The gender issue has also been important in this respect because the percentage of beneficiaries among female-headed households has been far larger than among male-headed households. At the same time, the amounts allocated per household has been, on average, smaller in case of female compared to male heads, though this relation reverses once we account for the differences in household characteristics. Indeed, we find that once these factors are taken into account, Iran’s social assistance system favors women, especially when they are poor, single, uneducated, widowed/divorced, and out-of-labor-force. Also, the relationships between assistance provision and household characteristics are different for female- and male-headed households in ways that suggest the predominance of a strong male-breadwinner view in the system. Our source of data is Iran’s Household Expenditure and Income Survey (HEIS) which has been collected annually since 1984 by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI). We start by reviewing the background literature and continue by describing the social assistance system in Iran. We then turn to the question about who receives assistance and how that assistance varies by the characteristics of the households.

In the Maghreb states like in other countries of the MENA region, the norms and shared expectations linked to the social contract established during the independence era define the boundaries of acceptable policy choices. The contract as such was conceptualised as being interventionist and redistributive, allowing for socio-economic development - or at least the prospect of it - through state redistribution in return for political loyalty often under authoritarian repression. The political economy of this ruling system was based upon 'profit distribution' to elite networks. While many researchers refer to the erosion of this social contract in the context of the uprisings in 2011, the rural dimension of the arrangement yet remains under researched. At the same time, policies in the post-2011 period also neglect rural populations and their claims in many ways, as research in Morocco and Tunisia shows. This paper analyses what the rural dimension of social contract embodies– its origins, its impact on social cohesion and on economic equity. The article argues that three trends currently contribute to the erosion and necessary re-negotiation of the social contract in rural areas. Firstly, overexploitation and climate change lead to a severe degradation of water and land resources –both key elements for the control of rural populations since colonial times- which challenges the established patterns of use and redistribution of the resources and of the gains from their exploitation. Secondly, the focus of agricultural policies -the sector still contributes to a large share of GDP and employment- on export production leads to further marginalisation of already disadvantaged small farmers who are in the majority. Thirdly, the emergence of new rural actors and especially of young leaders and (also feminine) farm workers challenges established patterns of loyalty and clientelism. On this basis, the paper outlines the key elements of the social contract’s rural dimension, the major trends that contribute to its erosion and the potential for its reformulation towards a more sustainable and egalitarian project. It builds on extensive empirical research in the region and aims at enhancing the debate on a ‘new social contract for the MENA region’ by explicitly focusing on social and environmental concerns in the rural settings.

Amidst an unstable political environment, Egypt’s bread subsidy has been, historically, a bastion of institutional stability. The program, which has left the price of bread untouched for over 30 years, has often been referred to by scholars as a form of social contract or part of clientelistic relationship between the Egyptian State and society. Nevertheless, claims to bread were an integral part of the 1978 riots, the 2011 Revolution, as well as the lead up to the 2013 Military coup. So in one sense, government subsidized bread is viewed as a concession for establishing or reaffirming political legitimacy, a means of buying citizens’ consent through cheap social provisions. However, throughout Egypt’s history as a republic, bread has also been a source of protest and mass mobilization against the State. Thus, paradoxically, one of the Egyptian State’s biggest strengths, it most reliable form of social welfare, has also been one of its biggest weaknesses. This double-edged property of social welfare in Egypt has been overlooked due to a lack of attention paid to the experience and discourse of welfare policy. My research is based on 7 months of ethnographic observations and interviews between 2013 and 2015 across 5 governorates in Egypt. In this paper, I argue that the same State-sponsored prescriptions and practices that obscure any viable notion of social rights in Egypt also rely on a constructed moral economy. It is this moral economy that has repeatedly been co-opted by its citizens to mobilize and subvert authority. For example, questions such as “Is bread a right?”, “Who deserves to receive subsidized bread?” and “Who is to blame for shortages and inefficiencies in the system?” are officially left unanswered. However, I find that citizens recognize and take advantage of these voids to develop a collective sense of morality (and potentially, indignation) in regards to the bread subsidy. In this paper I show that, in contrast to the connections typically drawn between discourse and control or categorization, Egypt’s bread subsidy imposes a discourse that relies on a sense of ambiguity, a lack of clarification, so as to avoid any concrete commitment by the State. Moving beyond this interpretive endeavor, I show how important this feature of the policy is to understanding bread’s significance to political protest in Egypt and its role as a medium for challenging State legitimacy.

In 1944, the mayor of Beit Jala wrote to the Director of Medical Services of Palestine, requesting an infant welfare center for his town. Such a center, the mayor argued, would greatly aid the progress of the town by teaching poor mothers the best methods of healthy childrearing. Infant welfare centers had begun to proliferate throughout Palestine from the mid-1920s, and the 1944 letter was not the first time someone in Beit Jala had petitioned for one to be established. In 1929, the district’s medical officer argued that town’s high infant mortality rates necessitated a clinic; in 1934, the mayor and local council had applied for a grant-in-aid from the government to help fund a center. By the mid-1940s, when Beit Jala finally established its infant welfare center, over eighty such institutions dotted Palestine’s landscape. Infant welfare, and the individuals and organizations involved in it, has not received much attention in the historiography of Mandate Palestine; yet examining the establishment and operation of infant welfare practices lends considerable insight into the on-the-ground social realties and political dynamics of Palestine in this period. By looking at three such clinics in Palestine – in Beit Jala, Ramallah, and Jifna – this paper argues that infant welfare care was a contested relationship of power between different layers of a fragmented system of governance. The colonial government, foreign and local voluntary organizations, and individual local actors interacted collaboratively and adversely in establishing a child welfare regime. In the interwar period, as child welfare became a site of global interest and intervention, a truly transnational infant welfare system in Palestine grew out of local political and social networks and the multifocal power structures of an unevenly colonized society. Central to the development and operation of infant welfare centers were historically overlooked actors, such as the municipal council members, who petitioned for clinics or the Palestinian nurses, who ran them. Drawing on infant welfare center records from the Government of Palestine, the Palestinian press, and published memoirs and articles, this paper shows that local power dynamics, and the negotiations between them, determined the emergence of the infant welfare network. In centering the everyday realities of public health and infant care, this paper – and the dissertation from which it is drawn – seeks to elucidate the operation of social governance in a colonized and newly internationalized Middle East.