Fulfilling human need

In both social policy and development studies, human need has been used extensively as a measure of poverty and an indicator for policy-making. Need signifies a problem expressed as a form of material suffering which is not necessarily dependent on low income (Sen, Reference Sen1999; Spicker, Reference Spicker2007). An important dimension of need is that it is socially constructed: needs are defined in relation to the social norms of a given society (Spicker, Reference Spicker2007). Based on the views expressed by all interviewees in this research, and confirmed by my own observations, human need also plays a pivotal role in the conceptualisation of social policy in Lebanon.

Need was expressed by interviewees in two ways: individual short-term deficits such as eating or paying school and hospital bills; and structural or qualitative deficits such as emotional, spiritual and psychological needs. This led to a definition of needs as outcomes as opposed to processes. In the Lebanese context, the term used to denote vulnerable or deprived social groups is ‘needy’ or ‘in need’ (the Arabic term is muhtajun). This is illustrated in the citation which follows. This term applied to older people, people with disabilities, problem drug users, social cases, orphans, AIDS victims, young women regarded as deviant, rejected groups, the marginalised and, finally, a vague category called poor.

Thus, the needs discourse was underscored by concerns to protect social morality. Need signified a deficiency in all the essential matters of daily living and manifested itself through deviance and delinquency. According to two programme managers when needs were fulfilled the person became a ‘correct individual’. In some instances, need also became another name for poverty. Indeed, the association was constantly made between lack of income and unsatisfied needs.

At the same time, for some FBOs, a focus on need meant that their beneficiaries did not always have to be among the poorest, since some categories of people may have had a need stemming from a physical or social disability, but they may have been financially well off: people with a disability, widows and the particular case of older people fell into this category. Indeed, some of the FBOs ran schools which were fee-paying. This is illustrated below.

Political interference and personal favours (wasta), as well as sectarian discrimination were recognised by social actors (including high-ranking officials at the MSA) as key impediments to the needs discourse across all of the welfare organisations that were researched.

From the point of view of service users, the needs with which they were most concerned were immediate material needs such as feeding and educating their children or, where possible, receiving financial assistance. They also valued the moral support FBOs gave them. The spiritual and moral dimensions of human needs were introduced by the FBOs as a result of their basic religious philosophy, although sometimes service users did request religious guidance classes.

Integrating poverty and the social case into policy

One of the main policy dilemmas I will discuss here was the difficulty which the MSA and FBOs faced in defining poverty and integrating it into their policies. Spicker (Reference Spicker2007) argues that although poverty might be the most researched and analysed subject in the social sciences, it is impossible to give it any single meaning. The ‘moral position’ suggested by Spicker (Reference Spicker2007: 8) and adopted in this article is to understand poverty as a multi-faceted experience encompassing problems of material needs, economic resources and social relationships. Poverty as a moral concept is one of the more controversial definitions in modern-day social science because of the complicated nature of defining social responsibility and the personal responsibility of the poor for their own situation (Spicker, Reference Spicker2007).

According to my research participants, poverty was also defined as a multi-dimensional concept with particular emphasis on ignorance (or poverty of the mind) and lack of income. This focus on ignorance is similar to ideas about the personal responsibility of the poor which existed in nineteenth-century England. Nevertheless, I would argue that the operationalisation of the concept of poverty by social actors in Lebanon to inform policy and programmes remained lacking. For, not only was the MSA in a dilemma as to whether or not to fully take on board the problem of poverty, but the FBOs themselves did not always deal directly with the issue of poverty, or reach the poorest of the poor.

In the Lebanese case, there was consensus across the welfare organisations that there had been increased impoverishment and socio-economic polarisation. Yet in their policy discourses, the concept of poverty appeared to have not quite achieved the legitimate status of a social problem which had to be addressed directly. Indeed, although the use of the concept was prevalent in the language used by interviewees, its place in policy was undermined by other considerations, notably social care, the social case and, most importantly, need. The concept of poverty was replaced altogether by others which were felt to be kinder such as ‘needy’ or more comprehensive such as istid‘aaf (meaning oppression or disempowerment).

Ever conscious of their limited resources, and convinced that a family could not be trusted to use financial assistance wisely, the FBOs preferred to offer in-kind social care services. As a result, by far the most important indicator of poverty and indeed the one that received most attention from social services was the inability of parents to pay for their children's education, followed by health and nutrition. This shifted the focus of social policy to the symptoms of poverty.

The relationship (or lack of) between poverty and the social case was the key problematic of social policy. As the key unit of analysis which the MSA's social care policy sought to correct, the social case had had to undergo a change in definition mainly during and after the civil war due to the urgency of dealing with the problem of poverty and financial hardship. As the citation below shows, the objective of the MSA when it first started was to provide shelter for orphans and children who had no chance at all of living within a family (termed by the MSA as social cases).

The social case arose primarily from the incidence of family breakdown due to the reasons mentioned above, although equal emphasis was placed by interviewees on the immoral behaviour of parents, such as gambling or sexual misconduct. The key problem was family breakdown because what the FBOs held as supremely important was family unity and morality.

Strong opinions were voiced among interviewees for and against the conflation between poverty and the social case with all nevertheless agreeing that poverty was the principal cause of the social case. Thus, almost 90 per cent of applications for social care were due to financial hardship. This meant that children were being removed from fairly stable family environments only for lack of household income.

Social care: institutional care versus family care

Social care is part of a wider array of personal social services which are offered to vulnerable groups in society who cannot work to support themselves, such as children, older people and people with a disability (Becker, Reference Becker and Millar2003). The literature highlights the varied debate on social care which includes the gendered division of social care responsibilities (Graham, Reference Graham2007) and the increasing incidence of informal care-giving (Arksey and Glendinning, Reference Arksey, Glendinning and Powell2007).

In the Lebanese context, the problematic of social care rested primarily on the tension between family care and institutional care, both of which were valid policies though imperfectly applied. As things stood, there was excessive dependence on institutional care because this was the cheaper and easier option for both FBOs and parents alike. This called into question how adequate was the quality of care for children in residential care institutions and how accurate was the assessment of service users' needs.

The pre-eminence of social care in Lebanon's welfare context also relates to a much broader concern with the preservation of the family unit as the basis of the good society. This adds a particularly ethical dimension to the understanding of social policy in Lebanon and is comparable to similar concerns with family cohesion and welfare, which Prochaska (Reference Prochaska1988) argues has been an enduring attribute of modern British philanthropy since the nineteenth century.

In Lebanon, the concept of social care was used by service providers in two ways: the more dominant meaning was as a social programme aimed at providing an alternative home for dependent social groups such as children, older people and widows, with orphans taking precedence; and as a general approach to social service which was based on needs satisfaction implying a rather paternalistic relationship between providers and users of welfare.

The option of institutional care was presented as a necessary though difficult choice. Its proponents argued that the welfare organisation did and could substitute for the natural family. The key sticking points concerning the quality of institutional care were the following:

• • the ability of the organisation to provide the child with enough affection and personal attention

• • the size of the organisation

• • the length of the child's stay in the organisation

• • how valid the need was for the child to enter institutional care, and

• • the responsibilities of family members towards the person going into care

This situation highlighted a key contradiction: social care institutions were acting as boarding schools. Indeed, proponents of institutional care as well as many parents pointed out that children lived much better in social care institutions than they did at home. In the case of older people, it also highlights the way in which social care simply turned into private nursing homes for older people whose children were not available to take care of them, or who were well off and independent enough to want to live alone.

Conversely, among the FBOs that strongly supported family care, there was evidence suggesting that family care was an ideal which was difficult to apply. The rationale for family care was clear for all interviewees both as a matter of ideological conviction to maintain the family unit, and also as a matter of what would ensure the best outcome measures for children. What was needed, therefore, was a reassessment of the eligibility criteria that allowed children to be put into institutional care.

Development: social care versus social investment

Like poverty, the concept of development has been much debated to encompass a whole variety of definitions, such as the growth of gross national product, the rise of personal incomes, industrialisation, technological advance or social modernisation (Sen, Reference Sen1999: 5). Sen's definition of development is based on expanding human freedom, which also involves developing human capabilities.

In low-income or ‘developing’ countries such as Lebanon, much of the work which is called social welfare or social security in Europe and North America would fall within the boundaries of the array of development projects funded by international institutions such as the World Bank and UN agencies (Davis, Reference Davis2004). Tyndale (Reference Tyndale2006) goes further by arguing that modern-day development has an almost religious character whereby high-income countries act from a moral high ground to extend aid to poorer countries. This common denominator of moral concern or duty ties in well with the present discussion on religious welfare in Lebanon. Indeed, it questions the validity of our instinctive mistrust of faith-based welfare since moral concerns for human wellbeing also underpin secular public action.

It was thus necessary during fieldwork to consider the role of development in the work of the FBOs. Although this was found to be still an endeavour in its infancy, discussion about development had the positive impact of fine-tuning the issues relating to the elaboration of social policy in Lebanon. Indeed, development posed the single biggest challenge of policy-making in the post-war era. Acting as the new organising axis for progressive social change, it posed serious questions about the traditional monopoly of social care over welfare services provision in the country.

Development was broadly understood by my research participants to mean a progressive social vision based on building productive and self-sufficient individuals living in a society that promoted social justice and equality. Development in this sense inherently depended on long-term planning for positive social transformation. But the reality of development work at the FBOs raised two points of contention. These related to the way that social actors defined where their organisation was located in terms of achieving the goals of development: developing capabilities or socio-economic investment; and individual or social development. For some of the FBOs, development was annexed to social care, as expressed below:

For other FBOs, the appeal of the concept of development for social actors lay in its intrinsic correlation to human autonomy, as the citation below illustrates. This can be attributed to the philosophy of transformational social change towards which some of FBOs were working.

The interviewee cited above argued that a focus on development necessarily meant a move away from charity and dependency to the cultivation of notions of rights and obligations among service users. Thus, although development was considered to achieve results that were more sophisticated or structurally transformational than social care, the final objective remained social care for the organisations. The synergy between development and social care was called ‘developing capabilities’, as expressed below.

The focus on developing capabilities contrasted with the other main definition of development which was recognised by the FBOs but which most noted was outside their remit. This was development conceptualised as socio-economic investment based fundamentally on employment creation and economic development. Development was here understood as a process intrinsically dependent upon long-term planning, a dimension of policy-making which was considered to be lacking at government level in Lebanon. At the heart of this understanding of development was that it treated the root causes of social problems, as illustrated below.

Poverty, morality and reaching the poor

Responses were mixed regarding the extent to which social actors thought their organisations were dealing directly with the issue of poverty or indeed reaching the poorest of the poor. This was hampered by three main issues: the emphasis paid to responding to human need which competed directly with reducing poverty; the very construction of certain programmes which by their very nature excluded certain categories of poor; and qualifying the condition of poverty with other variables.

All interviewees agreed that only government could reduce poverty by creating jobs. The FBOs providing social care services thought that education and awareness raising dealt directly with the poor, although they treated poverty in an indirect way. In that sense, not only were the FBOs educating Lebanon's future generations, but they were also helping to reduce the burden of poverty from parents who could no longer afford to pay for their children's education.

What was also noteworthy in welfare actors' conceptualisation of the role of poverty in policy was that the condition of poverty had to be qualified by other variables, such as absence of the male breadwinner or the beneficiary's sex, age and health status. Thus, none of the organisations had actual programmes for unemployed male earners apart from some of the micro-credit programmes which basically lent money to anyone who could pay the loan back.

While the FBOs did help service users find employment, the main social groups they focused on were the dependents of male breadwinners. Otherwise, they argued, they would have to cater for ‘three-quarters’ of the Lebanese population who, according to them, were poor. As a result, the approach to poverty tended to be palliative in most of the FBOs, except among those that had income-generating projects.

There were thus reasons to question the extent to which the FBOs truly were addressing the issue of poverty or indeed reaching the poor. What all interviewees confirmed was that there were members of the public who were in need but did not always access services. This is illustrated by the citation below.

Figure 1 presents a taxonomy of the rationale underpinning the two main programmes that were researched: social care and micro-credits. It suggests that from the outset, the make-up of such programmes limited their ability to directly treat poverty. This was especially evident in the micro-credit programmes where the FBO's concern that borrowers should pay back loans immediately excluded social groups with no initial capital against which they would borrow.

Figure 1.

Treating causes or symptoms of poverty: taxonomy of social care and micro-credit programmes

At Caritas, it was evident that not all beneficiaries were truly among the poorest of the poor. The case of the micro-credit village banks for women illustrated this. The following conversation highlights how service users were spread out along varying degrees of need, whereby the most destitute had access to direct social assistance and those who experienced sporadic financial hardship had access to micro-credit facilities.