Cash Transfers in Context
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Cash Transfers in Context

An Anthropological Perspective

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Emmanuelle Piccoli, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Emmanuelle Piccoli

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eBook - ePub

Cash Transfers in Context

An Anthropological Perspective

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Emmanuelle Piccoli, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Emmanuelle Piccoli

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About This Book

Marginal in status a decade ago, cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low- and middle-income countries. While these programs have had positive effects, they are typical of top-down development interventions in that they impose on local contexts standardized norms and procedures regarding conditionality, targeting, and delivery. This book sheds light on the crucial importance of these contexts and the many unpredicted consequences of cash transfer programs worldwide - detailing how the latter are used by actors to pursue their own strategies, and how external norms are reinterpreted, circumvented, and contested by local populations.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9781785339585

Chapter 1

Miracle Mechanisms, Traveling Models, and the Revenge of Contexts

Cash Transfer Programs: A Textbook Case

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan

Preliminary Note

On no account do I wish to adopt in this chapter a position in the debate “for” or “against” cash transfer programs as such. Cash transfer programs have many positive outcomes for very vulnerable households. However, they also have many unintended or adverse effects, mostly due to the perceptions and reactions of stakeholders (pragmatic contexts) in the course of their implementation. All other types of aid (among which traveling models are predominant by far) also have their unintended or adverse effects, and no miraculous form of intervention exists that is spared such effects. But policies are context-sensitive to varying degrees. Analyzing the “critical nodes,” bottlenecks, and implementation gaps encountered by any type of standardized intervention, regardless of the form of public action involved, on a solid empirical basis and bringing them out into the open is an indispensable step toward improving development programs, taking better account of the contexts in which they are implemented, and, if possible, adopting some alternative approaches embedded in the “real world.” I would like to bring the methodological resources of anthropology (qualitative research) to bear on such analyses.
In the introduction to this book, we attempted to fathom the diversity of cash transfers and to examine the critical nodes indicative of both the variety of the contexts in which CTs are implemented, and the plurality of action logics at work within each context.
In this chapter, I attempt to understand the emergence and global diffusion of CT programs based on the original success stories (Brazil and Mexico). I analyze how, based on this Latin American foundation stone, a fundamental distinction has emerged between a context (considered favorable but secondary) and a mechanism (considered central and explanatory), how a set of devices associated with the mechanism was gradually created and validated, and how this process culminated in a model intended for export along with all its specialists, procedures, expertise, training, manuals, evaluations, networks, and conferences (what could be referred to as the “CT business”).
I also examine how this model was promoted and has traveled throughout the world, based on different formula and in varying guises with diverging local adaptations in contexts that differ significantly from those in which it originated. I describe how, in the course of this process, local perceptions, practices, and logics were generally ignored (with some exceptions, of course) and how, as a result, the mechanism and its instruments were regularly circumvented by various local actors (the revenge of contexts).
The chapter concludes with the consideration of how CTs are symptomatic of a more general trend in the area of development: the standardization of interventions and the underestimation of the central role played by the contexts in their implementation.
Over the course of this examination, I also undertake three “theoretical digressions” on concepts and analyses used to describe the process of the production and diffusion of CTs, but which are also more general in scope and could form the object of a broader scientific debate.

The Making of a “Traveling Model”

In view of the extremely polysemous nature of the concept of a model, its use here should be clearly explained. I will not discuss computer models based on algorithms (simulations or projections as widely used in economy or in meteorology), or the cognitive, descriptive, and interpretive models that are common within the social sciences (GĂ©rard-Varet and Passeron 1995). I am interested in an entirely different category of models: standardized social interventions, mostly development interventions and public policies aimed at inducing changes in behavior. Hence, what is involved here are conscious, proactive, planned, institutionally formalized interventions of a social engineering nature and not simply ideas or technologies that circulate in a spontaneous manner or in accordance with the laws of the market (as generally arises with “cultural patterns” or commercial successes). The travel of models (in this sense) is different from the travel of ideas (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996; Weisser et al. 2014), although standardized interventions are shaped by paradigms, cognitive frameworks, intellectual fashions, and prevalent ideas.1 It is also different from the travel of commodities (or of business plans), although marketing techniques may be used in both cases. I prefer to focus on a clearly circumscribed category of phenomena that share an indisputable family resemblance on the empirical level, and CTs are emblematic of such a category. I borrow the expression traveling model from Rottenburg (2007) and Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg (2014). Bierschenk (2014: 77) proposes the expression “travelling blueprint.” For Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg (2014: 1), “a model can be understood as an analytical representation of particular aspects of reality created as an apparatus or protocol for interventions in order to shape this reality for certain purposes.” Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg’s (2014) theoretical perspective has the merit of involving intervention models; however, it uses the concept of the model in a very general way following the studies by Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) and Czarniawska and Sevon (2005) on “traveling ideas.”2 The concept will be used here in a narrower sense—which is particularly suited to the case of CTs but to other phenomena too—by referring to the “traveling model” as all standardized institutional interventions (a public policy, a program, a reform, a project, a protocol—depending on the scales or areas involved) intended to initiate a given social change and based on a “mechanism” and “devices” (see below) deemed to have intrinsic properties that will make it possible to induce this change in different implementation contexts.
In political science, the “traveling” done by models is referred to as policy transfer.3 This expression focuses on the borrowing (with some adaptations) by decision-makers in context A of a public policy or elements thereof already implemented in context B.4 However it makes no mention of the process involved in the production of a model of international scope and its standardization, which is typical of development policies. Development policies are nothing more than a specific subset of policies, that are more often than not (especially in African settings) designed, promoted, and funded from the outside. Models are very common in the area of development. Within the developmentist configuration (Olivier de Sardan 2005), in which models represent the core business in a sense, they follow on from each other, they travel a lot, and they travel far.
As demonstrated by the case of CTs, the specific production of a traveling model involves three main processes:5 narrativization (a founding success story), theorization and social engineering (the construction of a mechanism), and networking (global diffusion). These three processes are deeply dependent on international organizations and networks of experts, which come forward as champions of a given traveling model. Needless to say, these processes (which can overlap) arise in an environment that has already been described extensively in policy analyses, either on the basis of a sequential perspective (emergence, formulation, decision, implementation; see Sabatier 1992; Lemieux 2002) or according to the metaphor of the “couplings” between three “streams” (Kingdon 1995): the problems, solutions, and political will. In the case in point, the world economic crisis and the debates and issues surrounding the “eradication of poverty” and humanitarian interventions constitute the sociopolitical environment that presided over the birth and success of the cash transfer model. However, the particular added value of CTs is based on the three processes of narrativization, theorization, and networking. It is these three processes in particular (and not only the actual intrinsic properties of the CT mechanisms as stated in the official discourse6) that have underpinned the “career” of CTs as a traveling model and made them into an indispensable point of reference for all social policies and development and humanitarian intervention policies in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC).
CTs are clearly an example of a very successful traveling model. Its multiple peregrinations have taken it to the four corners of the globe. However, it presents all of the characteristics of other traveling models, which include “attempts at the full-scale transposition of organizational models developed somewhere else as solutions to specific problems found elsewhere” (Bierschenk 2014: 82).
A traveling model needs to refer to an inaugural experience somewhere in the world. This is an indispensable stage in its production and subsequent exportation. “In policymaking circles, experience has a unique status as a justification of effectiveness; it shows that a proposal is not just based upon ‘head in the clouds’ speculation” (Rose 1991: 5; quoted by Debonneville and Diaz 2013: 166). For CTs, there were not one but two inaugural experiences, both located in Latin America.
Brazil and Mexico: The Starting Point
The history of CTs begins in Brazil and Mexico.7
Brazil: The Long Evolution to Bolsa Familia
Two parallel, noncontributory benefit systems operated by the federal state and involving payments equivalent to the minimum wage for the elderly and disabled have existed in Brazil since the 1970s.8 Various experiments involving conditional CT programs were launched at the local level (Federal District, Sao Paulo state, and some municipalities) from 1995. Most of them were aimed at poor families, and focused on education and school attendance with a view to combating child labor and school absenteeism. The federal government contributed significantly to the program from 1997, and many municipalities also joined them. The Bolsa Escola program was taken over by the federal state and implemented at the national level in 2001 under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It was subsequently transformed into the Bolsa Familia program under his successor, Lula de Silva, in 2003, and expanded to cover three other social programs. The new version included new devices, unified the existing programs, and updated the lists of beneficiaries.
The Bolsa Escola and Bolsa Familia benefits were and are paid preferably to mothers with an income below a minimum salary. Bolsa Escola was initially paid to women with children between the ages of seven and fourteen years, and later six to fifteen years, while Bolsa Familia was recently extended to families with children up to seventeen years old, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers. The payments are conditional, with the communes responsible for the imposition of the conditionalities: families must fulfill certain educational requirements (minimum school attendance of 85 percent by the children was initially required; however, there was little monitoring of compliance until 2006) and health requirements (one medical check every six months and immunizations) to obtain the benefits.
It must be stressed that this process was not as linear as this summary may suggest and, as highlighted by Fabio Soares (2011) and Sonia Rocha (2014), it involved multiple attempts, continuous adjustments, negotiation between competing views, and extensive institutional pragmatism under both the communal and federal management. The program had numerous failures (many local experiments with the Bolsa Familiar para a Educaçao, Bolsa Escola, or Bolsa Alimentaçao were considered failures), as well as some successes (for example for the city of Campinas and the federal district of Brasilia) generated by favorable conditions that were difficult to reproduce in other locations. Several CT programs were implemented at the same time between 1995 and 2001 and with very variable results. The launch of the Bolsa Escola at the federal level (1998–2001) was a general failure in targeting and coordination with the communes. Lula’s rise to power was crucial for the unification of various social programs under the banner of Bolsa Familia.9 However, just a few months after the launch of Bolsa Familia, Lula created another CT program based on food cards, which was severely criticized and quickly abandoned. In 2012, Bolsa Familia successfully innovated by implementing a new service for families in extreme poverty (around 4.3 percent of the population), which was aimed at guaranteeing a minimum income for these families (Rocha 2014: 208).
In any event, Bolsa Escola and Bolsa Familia were both broadly considered as significant successes on the basis of their scale, and they were progressively more effective: in 2012, benefits were distributed by Bolsa Familia to around 18 percent of Brazilian families (Rocha 2014: 15). According to Galvani (2017: 6), “The Bolsa Familia program is the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world, reaching 14 million families (about 50 million people).”

Mexico: Progresa and Oportunidades

Here too, the first CT program did not emerge in a void. Many food assistance programs had existed previously, and the Pronasol program later encompassed some forms of social assistance (in particular Alimentacion, Nutricion y Salud). All of these programs were sharply criticized for their clientelist use by the dominant political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had been in power for a long time and was an expert in the politics of patronage. Procampo, a nonconditional CT program aimed at elderly farmers, was implemented in 1993. Progresa was launched in 1997 in response to the economic crisis of 1995, and was established at the national level from the outset. It targeted three hundred thousand vulnerable rural households on the basis of a statistical selection process (from the perspective of its promoters to avoid the abuses and deviations that would have been possible with community targeting). Basically, the conditionalities were the same as those applied in Brazil (school attendance and medical checkups), but their design was more complex and they played a more central role in this case, as they were more strictly controlled and enshrined in an ideology labeled as “co-responsibility,” according to which each of the two “partners” (state and beneficiaries) were obliged to fulfill their side of the contract (providing the CTs for one and complying with the conditions for the other). The program primarily targeted indigenous communities and women (Gil-Garcia 2016). Despite numerous criticisms of the targeting process, Progresa was extended significantly (five million households, including in urban areas) under the presidency of Vincente Fox (following the defeat of the PRI in 2000) and renamed Oportunidades in 2002. It eventually became Prospera in 2014. As is the case in Brazil, CCTs have become a national policy in Mexico that extends across party-political divisions.

The First Stage of the Model: Construction of a Success Story

So how did the Brazilian and Mexican programs become exportable beyond their respective and very specific historical and sociopolitical contexts to the point of becoming a “new paradigm” for eradicating poverty (Su...

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