Gender, Citizenship and New Approaches to Poverty Relief: Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes in Argentina

Abstract

Recent years have seen poverty and social exclusion debates attain renewed attention in international policy circles and donor agencies. The “lost decade” and the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the persistence of poverty and inequality in many Latin American countries and the current international consensus around the Millennium Development Goals invigorated attempts to tackle poverty and to provide, at least rhetorically, market liberalism a more inclusive face. New approaches to address poverty in the form of conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs) provide an example of the new “inclusive liberalism” (Porter and Craig 2004) developed in Latin America. With the intent of reembedding the market and mitigating the social consequences of marketled liberalism, a discourse of “investment” has emerged, aimed at including the par excellence liberal subject: the vulnerable. Efforts to fi ght poverty are articulated in targeted and demand-led programmes that provide assistance to poor families conditional on the performance of socially valued activities, such as paid work, or investing in children’s health and education. Their objective is to fi ght immediate poverty by giving cash directly to families, and to diminish vulnerability in the long term by investing in the human capabilities of poor children-the “citizen-workers” of the future (Lister 2003).