ABSTRACT
In Chapter 6, entitled ‘Lost in translation: social protection and the search for security in Bogotá, Colombia’, Andrea Lampis (Colombia) presents a set of case studies that question an increasingly common global trend in social protection: the so-called social floor and social investment paradigms. Urban areas in the global South are the testing ground for new social configurations of social protection, which are of great relevance for people and agency in general, not only for the poor. Although still formally administered by public bodies, these reconfigurations factually respond to the new logic of privatization and commodification of individual and collective security. Using the fractal metaphor, the case illustrates how women and men in both secure and insecure employment in Bogotá tend to escape the new hegemonic logic of social protection. The analysis underlines the contradiction between market-driven practices and the traditional welfare statedriven principles invoked to justify the implementation of these practices.
