This edited volume by Kaasch and Martens will be essential reading for scholars and students of global social policy, an emerging subfield. In the mid-1990s, inspired in large part by Bob Deacon's (Reference Deacon, Hulse and Stubbs1997) book, Global Social Policy, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly became attuned to the role that international actors were playing in social policy areas long thought to be dominated by domestic politics and policy. In the international political economy literature too, the welfare state had been conceived of as a set of domestic institutions intended to cushion workers from the impact of the global economy. This was the core message of the seminal work of Cameron and Katzenstein in the late 1970s. Similarly, the welfare state “worlds” described by Esping-Andersen were rooted in domestic politics and proved to be resistant to international interference.

However, by the 1990s, the progress of globalization and global public policy was having an undeniable impact on the institutions of the European welfare state through reforms like pension privatization and social policy benchmarking within the context of the European Union. The hybridization of the European welfare states resulted, in large part, from international policy actors and influences. This rising empirical awareness pushed the study of social policy up to the international level. Scholars inquired into the policies and approaches pursued by different international organizations and the politics within and between them, the subject of the present volume.

Kaasch and Martens’ excellent study provides the deepest dive to date into the policies of a wide range of global social policy actors. It includes excellent chapters on the International Labour Organization (Deacon), The World Bank (Mund and Verger), the OECD (Mahon), the EU (Fargion and Mayer), as well as the BRICS (Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans), and the G20 (Kirton, Kulik, and Bracht), the latter two being organizations that have rarely been considered to have any substantial involvement in this area at all. In addition, the book considers the role of NGOs (Kruse and Martens) and the media (Nullmeier). The range of outstanding and innovative analyses contained in this book ensure that it will be seen as the leading edge in this field for some time to come, providing a broad empirical basis to back up the core observation of the field – that international actors matter in social policy governance worldwide.

This book also takes some important steps towards explaining how global social policy actors matter – a key theoretical question of the emerging literature. Chapters by Jessop on Cultural Political Economy and Stubbs and Wedel on Policy Flexians provide sharp and innovative approaches, though neither of these approaches fully complements the other, nor clearly frames the empirical chapters. Rather, they represent distinctive theoretical contributions that may advance empirical scholarship in the field in future. In particular, this reviewer found the “flexians” concept to be challenging and useful. Going beyond the notion of the “policy entrepreneur,” which has long been viewed as a key mechanism for the transmission of global policy, Stubbs and Wedel describe “flexians” as “a new breed of power broker” who moves seamlessly between institutions and levels of government, sometimes working in the private sector and sometimes in international organizations or national governments, universities, or think tanks, “blurring the line between official and private spheres.” The authors contrast “flexians” with “shadow lobbyists,” who “may be focused entirely on material gain.” It will remain important for this literature to develop the right concepts for talking about global policy making in this sphere and this book makes some steps in that direction.

However, the preponderant impact of this book will be in its magnificent sweeping empirical contribution to the literature. In one place, the reader can learn about social policy discourse within the OECD Secretariat, the role of the World Bank in education policy globally, and the ILO's 100-year search for social justice within capitalism. Bob Deacon's chapter on the ILO focuses on the pioneering international organization in the realm of labor and social policy. It shows how the ILO developed after the First World War and faced new challenges after the Second World War when the Bretton Woods institutions, particularly the World Bank, began to challenge it for a large part of its turf. It ends with a detailed consideration of conflict and cooperation between different international organizations in the global social policy field. The chapter by Mundy and Verger shows how, over a fifty-year period, the World Bank developed a distinct approach to education, moving from providing basic material inputs to now “focusing on improving learning outcomes through ambitious systemic reforms.” Mahon's chapter on the OECD demonstrates how this organization emerged as a global social policy player by founding a new working party on social policy and initiating reports on “The Future of Social Protection” in 1988, inclusion through work, as well as women's pay equality, resulting in the report on “Closing the Gender Gap” in 2012. The chapter on the EU by Fargion and Mayer focuses on EU support for the Millennium Development Goals. Surender and Urbina-Ferretjans’ chapter on the BRICS shows that South-South government ties have also had some role in global social policy, something few scholars would have even thought about a decade before. In particular, the BRICS donor group has expanded the diversity of funding sources for developing countries, as well as social policy norms and approaches. Even the G20 has played a growing role in global social policy governance, setting norms in the wake of the global financial crisis, as elucidated by Kirton, Kulik, and Bracht. The chapters by Kruse and Martens as well as Nullmeier provide a useful overview of NGO and media involvement, respectively, in global social policy discourse.

In short, this book compiles a state-of-the-art perspective on global social policy actors. It also advances understanding of how global policy actors work. It is an important collection of essays by leading scholars in the field that will facilitate widespread understanding of the international dimension of social policy worldwide and inspire new research in this emerging field.