Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Trade Review “The book is recommendable for anyone interested in the recent proliferation of a seemingly globalised social policy, that, however, is here shown to have very different faces, logics and effects in different localities across the global South.” • Critical Social Policy
“This is a very interesting study of targeted cash transfers mainly from an anthropological perspective. While, as the authors point out, there is an abundant literature on such transfers (particularly in terms of ‘grey’ literature) most of this is heavily econometric and top-down rather than providing a more bottom-up perspective.…an innovative study which deserves a wide readership both amongst academics and policy makers working in the field.” • European Journal of Social Security
“Read this book for a thoughtful analysis of how models travel if you are interested in institutional diffusion and the globalisation of social policy…[It shows that] Anthropology can make a contribution to understanding the politics of aid and social policy.” • Anthrodendum
“This book has much to say to scholars, students and practitioners of development. It addresses a particular development model which is widely disseminated around the globe, neither aiming to endorse nor critique it in principle, but to examine how it actually works, or fails to work, in specific locations.” • Lindsay DuBois, Dalhousie University
“This book – the first collection of its kind – will make an important contribution to the literature on cash transfer programs. Many of the chapters are written by practitioners with in-depth knowledge of the communities they write about, which brings an on-the-ground perspective that is often missing from the literature.” • Linda Abarbanell, San Diego State University
Table of Contents List of Figures and Tables
Cash Transfers and the Revenge of Contexts: An Introduction
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Piccoli
Chapter 1. Miracle Mechanisms, Travelling Models, and the Revenge of the Contexts:
Cash Transfer Programmes; A Textbook Case
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan
Chapter 2. Realizing Cash Transfer Programs through Collective Obligations: An Ethnography of Co-responsibility in Mexico
Alejandro Agudo Sanchíz
Chapter 3. Types of Permanence: Conditional Cash, Economic Difference, and Gender Practice in Northeastern Brazil
Gregory Duff Morton
Chapter 4. Queuing in the Sun: The Salience of Implementation Practices in Recipients’ Experience of a Conditional Cash Transfer
Maria Elisa Balen
Chapter 5. Conditional Cash Transfer Program Implementation and Effects in Peruvian Indigenous Contexts
Norma Correa Aste, Terry Roopnaraine and Amy Margolies
Chapter 6. Making Good Mothers: Conditions, Coercion, and Local Reactions in the Juntos Program in Peru
Emmanuelle Piccoli and Bronwen Gillespie
Chapter 7. Expectations beyond Development: Towards a Prospective Chronology of Cash Transfers from Mexico to Argentina
Andrés Dapuez and Sabrina Gavigan
Chapter 8. Conditional Cash Transfer and Gender, Class, and Ethnic Domination: The Case of Bolivia
Nora Nagels
Chapter 9. Behind the Official Story: The Unintended Effects of Social Transfer Programmes in Conflict-Affected Contexts
Fiona Samuels and Nicola Jones
Chapter 10. Are Cash Transfers Rocking or Wrecking the World of Social Workers in Egypt?
Hania Sholkamy
Chapter 11. Juggling between Social Obligations and Personal Benefit in Western Côte d’Ivoire: How Do Ex-combatants Spend their Cash Allowance?
Magali Chelpi-den Hamer
Chapter 12. Cash Transfers in Rural Niger: Social Targeting as a Conflict of Norms
Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Oumarou Hamani
Index
