Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico

Sociological studies stress how state legibility serves as a form of populational control. Often overlooked are how states differ in their will to control, and how this variation shapes legibility projects. This article proposes a three-dimensional analytical framework to study legibility from a comparative perspective that seeks to account for this variation. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework through an in-depth analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement conditional cash transfer programs (or CCTs). In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy, facing very similar challenges; yet, they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs and making poor families visible. Drawing on the analysis of approximately 10,000 pages of official documents, 100 in-depth interviews with bureaucratic and political elites, and 18 months of fieldwork in Brazil and Mexico, this article reveals the political and governance effects of distinct methods of seeing like a state. Specifically, I show that the differences and consequences of legibility projects depended on the politics of legitimation of each CCT program and had the unanticipated effect of making the state itself visible to broader publics and thus subject to intense scrutiny.

Cumulative Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

Conditional cash transfers provide income and promote human capital investments. Yet evaluating their longitudinal impacts is hard, as most experimental evaluations treat control locations after a few years. We examine such impacts in Indonesia after six years, where the program rollout left the experiment largely intact. We find static effects on many targeted indicators: childbirth using trained professionals increased dramatically, and under-15 children not in school fell by half. We observe impacts requiring cumulative investments: stunting fell by 23 percent. While human capital accumulation increased, the transfers did not lead to transformative economic change for recipient households. (JEL I21, I38, J13, J24, O15)

Poverty and human capital in Chile: The processes of subjectivation in conditional cash transfer programs

Utilizing Foucault’s insights on neoliberalism, his notion of governmentality in relation to the State, and his insights on the processes of subjectivity (2007; 2006) the following article seeks to critically examine Chile’s Ethical Family Income (IEF), a conditional cash transfer program that was implemented in the country from 2011 to 2016. Utilizing interview excerpts with women who participated in the program, the article analyzes the manner in which the program operated as a contemporary form of governmentality by installing a particular production of subjectivity in which meritorious recipients of state aid are shaped as productive, responsible, independent citizens who actively invest in accumulating human capital in order to transform themselves and their children into entrepreneurial individuals. The article concludes discussing possibilities of resistance to neoliberal rationality processes of subjectivation in poverty eradication policies and programs.

Do Conditional Cash Transfers Empower Women? Insights from Brazil’s Bolsa Família

ABSTRACTConditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have emerged as an important social welfare innovation across the Global South in the last two decades. That poor mothers are typically the primary recipients of the grants renders easy, but not necessarily correct, the notion that CCTs empower women. This article assesses the relationship between the world’s largest CCT, Brazil’s Bolsa Família, and women’s empowerment. To systematize and interpret existing research, including our own, it puts forth a three-part framework that examines the program’s effects on economic independence, physical health, and psychosocial well-being. Findings suggest that women experience some improved status along all three dimensions, but that improvements are far from universal. A core conclusion is that the broader institutional context in which the Bolsa Família is embedded—that is, ancillary services in health and social assistance—is crucial for conditioning the degree of empowerment obtained.