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 imported and standardized norms and procedures regarding conditionality, targeting, and delivery on local contexts. 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.
Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France) and Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). Emmanuelle Piccoli is an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, France.
List of Figures and TablesCash Transfers and the Revenge of Contexts: An IntroductionJean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle PiccoliChapter 1. Miracle Mechanisms, Travelling Models, and the Revenge of the Contexts: Cash Transfer Programmes; A Textbook CaseJean-Pierre Olivier de SardanChapter 2. Realizing Cash Transfer Programs through Collective Obligations: An Ethnography of Co-responsibility in MexicoAlejandro Agudo SanchízChapter 3. Types of Permanence: Conditional Cash, Economic Difference, and Gender Practice in Northeastern BrazilGregory Duff MortonChapter 4. Queuing in the Sun: The Salience of Implementation Practices in Recipients’ Experience of a Conditional Cash TransferMaria Elisa BalenChapter 5. Conditional Cash Transfer Program Implementation and Effects in Peruvian Indigenous ContextsNorma Correa Aste, Terry Roopnaraine and Amy MargoliesChapter 6. Making Good Mothers: Conditions, Coercion, and Local Reactions in the Juntos Program in PeruEmmanuelle Piccoli and Bronwen GillespieChapter 7. Expectations beyond Development: Towards a Prospective Chronology of Cash Transfers from Mexico to ArgentinaAndrés Dapuez and Sabrina GaviganChapter 8. Conditional Cash Transfer and Gender, Class, and Ethnic Domination: The Case of BoliviaNora NagelsChapter 9. Behind the Official Story: The Unintended Effects of Social Transfer Programmes in Conflict-Affected ContextsFiona Samuels and Nicola JonesChapter 10. Are Cash Transfers Rocking or Wrecking the World of Social Workers in Egypt?Hania SholkamyChapter 11. Juggling between Social Obligations and Personal Benefit in Western Côte d’Ivoire: How Do Ex-combatants Spend their Cash Allowance?Magali Chelpi-den HamerChapter 12. Cash Transfers in Rural Niger: Social Targeting as a Conflict of NormsJean Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Oumarou HamaniIndex
"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