Targeting versus social protection in cash transfers in the Philippines: Reassessing a celebrated case of social protection

Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal,Andrew M Fischer,Charmaine G Ramos

doi:10.1177/02610183211009891

Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal, Andrew M Fischer + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183211009891

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Abstract

This article provides a corrective to the dominant celebratory narrative about the conditional cash transfer programme in the Philippines, the Pantawid, and its associated social registry, the Listahanan. Based on extensive documentary analysis and fieldwork in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, we argue that the targeting system has in fact been unable to function according to its primary purpose of identifying the poor and providing them social protection, despite being celebrated precisely for this purpose. This has been partly – but not only – due to the increasingly obsolescent data of the registry, which the political system has been incapable of correcting, leading to stasis at a fairly low level of coverage, at a peak of about 19 percent of national households in 2014 and since subsiding to about 17 percent by 2020, with transfer amounts at a fraction of the food poverty line. This dysfunction has resulted in a quasi-permanent group of cash payment recipients, with little or no reflection of evolving poverty profiles. This revised reading of the Pantawid and Listahanan, in what might be considered as a strong case to examine social protection performance, brings us back to the perennial problems associated with poverty targeting in even best-case social protection programmes promoted by international donors and organisations.

Highlights

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme in the Philippines – the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program
There is not enough space here to elaborate on the politics surrounding this process, it suffices to note that there was a consensus among the donor and Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) key informants that the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) played major roles, in particular around the adoption of CCTs in the Philippines. This view is confirmed in the documents we examined and in some of the secondary literature, and is instantiated by the fact that the policy process was strongly supported by two sets of loans from the WB and the ADB, the first during Aquino’s term and the second at the start of Duterte’s administration in 2016, with additional WB funding approved in 2019 (ADB, 2016; WB, 2016, 2019c)
Over the decade when the Listahanan was created and deployed within the rapid expansion and stagnation of the Pantawid, the combination of the two yielded an increasingly outdated picture of who needs social protection in the Philippines. They have been unable to function according to their primary purpose of identifying the poor and providing them social protection, despite being celebrated precisely for this purpose

Summary

Introduction

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme in the Philippines – the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program This precise claim was made to us by a senior WB staff person who we interviewed in the Philippine office in 2018 That these narratives of success of the Pantawid and Listahanan have been mostly produced or commissioned by international donors that simultaneously support the widening scope of poverty-targeting in social provisioning sheds light on broader processes of external influence in the evolution of social policy systems in the Global South. In this respect, much of the literature on external influence in social protection focuses on the politics of dissemination

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Conclusion