Supporting a Counterfactual Futurity: Cash Transfers and the Interface between Multilateral Banks, the Mexican State, and its People

Abstract

Resumen Basado en entrevistas con funcionarios de desarrollo y análisis de evidencias históricas, sostengo que, en lugar de estar dirigida a romper el ciclo intergeneracional de reproducción de la pobreza, los programas de transferencias monetarias de México Procampo (1994) y Progresa‐Oportunidades (1997–2002–2014) se implementaron para facilitar un ajuste estructural de largo plazo, mantener una constante migración de zonas rurales a zonas urbanas, “convertir” a niños campesinos a nuevas actividades económicas, monetizar la economía rural, incentivar nuevas formas de liderazgo político y abolir el “caciquismo tradicional”. Validado no sólo a través de estadísticas y de análisis cualitativo, sino también por los “métodos experimentales de evaluación de impacto,” Progresa‐Oportunidades se justifica en una dimensión “contrafactual” de (pseudo) Casos Controlados Aleatoriamente. Por lo tanto, concluyo que la prueba “contrafactual” de las transferencias monetarias asocia progreso y desarrollo a causalidades redundantes de formas de vida urbana, en vez de demostrar el alcance de objetivos.

Capital deprivation, assets, and the Universal Child Allowance for Social Protection in a Paraná slum, Argentina

“…Previous work on cash transfer investments in rural work and assets in Mexico (Dapuez 2013), Malawi (Boone, Covarrubias, Davis & Winters 2013), and Brazil (Morton 2015) provided reason to believe that capital reproduction occurring in poor households may be radically different from that promised, imagined, and expected through CCT's policies (Dapuez 2020). This is confirmed by my study of family budgets in particular.…”

“…In this article, I draw on my collaborative research experience on cash transfer policies in Argentina and Mexico (Dapuez 2013; 2016; 2017 a ; 2017 b ; 2020; Dapuez, Raffo, Kendziur & Sabogal 2017). My previous interviews with state officials framed the ethnographic enterprise that I carried out with three of my doctoral students while living among families in the outskirts of the city of Paraná, Entre Ríos province, Argentina.…”

Free money's ideological nature: A comparative analysis of unconditional cash transfers in Eastern Africa

“…Cookson (2018), for instance, has illustrated how a Peruvian CT program relied on non‐remunerated work by women that subsequently became appropriated and rebranded as the program's success. Furthermore, anthropologists have explored how social workers acting as “street level bureaucrats” massively influence how CT programs are carried out (Neumark, 2020; Sholkamy, 2018) as well as how experts justify the implementation of new and the continuation of existing CT programs by highlighting CTs' positive impacts while relying on questionable methods (Dapuez, 2016). In addition, scholars have shown that many CT programs integrate recipients into other social, political, and infrastructural projects, such as exploitative forms of financialization (Kar, 2020), and have criticized the all‐to‐positive voices that neglect the fact that CT programs often reproduce hierarchies and inequalities based upon gender, racial, or xenophobic exclusion (Torkelson, 2021), thereby highlighting the importance of local contexts (de Sardan, 2018; Fotta & Balen, 2018).…”

Cash Transfers

“…Such CT infrastructures undergird the circulation of cash, information, and people, organise territories and populations, create an often-invisible environment for other interactions, and shape individual behaviour. Understanding diverse political and social effects of CT infrastructures therefore requires conducting ethnographic fieldwork across different levels, including in governmental centres or at meetings of transnational organisations, and considering the work of technicians and bureaucrats of various kinds (e.g Dapuez 2016…”