This paper looks at a particular type of anti‐poverty aid and its implications for gender inequality. The development model underpinning the Mexican Oportunidades Programme, a ‘flagship’ in Latin America, focuses on the reduction of inter‐generational poverty through transfers conditioned on ‘co‐responsibilities’ fulfilled especially by mothers and aimed at strengthening the human capital of household members. Through a consultant‐insider narrative on the tension between this policy model and the actual lives of beneficiaries, the paper scrutinizes the delivery of the Programme in the light of the capabilities approach. Some case studies are then examined within this framework, assessing the position of women in each case by reviewing the state of their capabilities and resources. This exercise reveals social relationships obscured by the Programme’s representations and assumptions of gender roles within families, pointing to a significant failure to address women’s own needs by development schemes aimed at poverty rather than at inequality.Poverty, Inequality, Oportunidades Programme, Capability approach, Family, Women, Mexico,

Recibido: 15 de abril de 2013 Aceptado: 2 de julio 2013 ResumenTanto si repudian como si defienden la llamada antropología aplicada, muchos antropólogos comparten lógicas similares con los integrantes de las comunidades profesionales de las polí-ticas públicas. Este solapamiento se refleja en suposiciones sobre la separación y correlación jerárquica entre teoría y práctica, así como en diversos intentos por resolver la tensión entre lo general y lo particular. Estas coincidencias entre antropología y política, aunque también las diferencias epistemológicas que las separan, se muestran aquí a través del análisis de la evaluación de los impactos de un programa de desarrollo. Incluso antes de iniciar el trabajo de campo y regresar con sus descripciones etnográficas a las arenas institucionales de la política, los consultores antropológicos son disciplinados y socializados en el arte de reinterpretar los resultados de su investigación en términos del modelo del programa. La práctica produce y orienta a la política, si bien aquélla reside precisamente en los esfuerzos interpretativos de diversos participantes del desarrollo por sostener representaciones coherentes de la realidad frente a la contingencia de los acontecimientos.Palabras clave: antropología y consultoría; políticas públicas; México; desarrollo; evaluación de impacto. AbstractWhether they reject or advocate so-called applied anthropology, many anthropologists share logics similar to those of the members of policy's professional communities. This overlap is reflected in assumptions about the separation of theory and "its" practice, as well as in different attempts to resolve the tension between the general and the particular. Both these similarities and the epistemological differences between anthropology and policy are outlined here through an account of a development programme's impact assessment. Even before beginning fieldwork and returning with their ethnographic descriptions to the institutional arenas of policy, anthropologist-consultants are disciplined and socialized into the art of reinterpreting their research results in terms of the programme's model. Practice produces and orders policy, yet such practice resides precisely in the interpretive efforts by diverse development practitioners to sustain coherent representations of reality against the contingency of events.

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