The ghostwriting of a global policy script: international organizations and the discursive construction of conditional cash transfers

Abstract

ABSTRACT More than 60 countries have implemented a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. The predominant CCT narrative begins from programs created in Mexico and Brazil in the mid-1990s. The literature concerned with CCTs tends to take this narrative as a given. In this article, we examine the role of international organizations (IOs) in the global governance of social policy by exploring the use of narratives as a strategy IOs employ to claim and generate legitimacy for global policy models. We investigate how the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Food Policy Research Institute have discursively constructed the CCT model in their policy documents and thus crafted the CCT narrative. Our analysis sheds light on ‘ghost-writing’ i.e., the IOs practice of concealing their central role in writing scripts for policy models. Thus, our case adds a novel aspect to the existing scholarship on the global proliferation of policies.