ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how social protection, a relatively new concept, has roots in two traditional, but different, types of social provisions, namely safety nets and social security. With the new Sustainable Development Goals the eradication of extreme poverty remains the first goal. The chapter examines how different approaches to justice have different political and philosophical meanings, and expose some of the consequences of these for social protection. For the most part, existing justice perspectives on social protection are non-relational in the sense that social protection is regarded as a right owed to all citizens, irrespective of the situation of others. International organisations have tended to focus more on the how than the why of social protection. Justice frameworks for social protection have been introduced almost retrospectively, both to describe how concepts of social justice have inadvertently shaped different expressions of social protection, and to prescribe how ideas of justice should guide social protection in its wider policy context.
