Abstract
Cash transfers (CTs) have proliferated across the globe since the late 1990s and so have publications by political scientists, economists, development scholars and practitioners. These have researched different programme designs, CTs’ effectiveness for poverty reduction, and the social turn in global policies that they represent. More recent studies have also traced the political decision making processes and elite consensuses around social protection in developing countries; and pointed to the inherently residual and/or neoliberal nature of this new form of social policy. However, bottom-up empirical analyses of how receiving societies make sense of, view, and use social cash transfers, are much rarer. Hence, the volume edited by Professor of Anthropology Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Assistant Professor in Development Studies Emmanuelle Piccoli promises a valuable addition to, and critical divergence from, existing approaches.
Cash Transfers in Context: An Anthropological Perspective achieves two main things: it sheds light on how the global model of CTs has travelled across the globe, and it demonstrates how heterogeneous the contexts are within which that model is translated. It thereby connects the theorising about a recent policy phenomenon built on a transnational theory of change with careful in-depth studies of localities across Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. In the introduction, the editors set out not only to show how emblematic CTs are for development interventions that search for problems to fit one-size-fits-all solutions, but also to make the methodological point that the quantitative research that underlies global models is inherently limited in what it can understand (pp. 16–17).
Olivier de Sardan then offers a theoretically oriented account of how the first Brazilian and Mexican experiences with CTs in the 1990s were translated into a standardised mobile model that has served as a device in many other places since. This is an insightful advancement of our understanding of how policy diffusion actually works, not least with regards to the key role played by transnationally recognised experts and international organisations. These processes are arguably still under-theorised and his suggestion to break diffusion up into three steps (narrativation, theorisation and networking) provides one fruitful way to think about it (pp. 31–32). Like a second introduction, this chapter sets the scene for the case studies that follow, by emphasising the importance of taking into account the actual conditions into which the model of CTs is diffused, including the study of how it is translated into locally meaningful concepts and adapted to local interests.
The overall argument of the book is that imposing global models leads to a ‘revenge’ of contexts. How this ‘revenge’ can look is then elaborated in the ten chapters that follow. They all share a close attention to individual cases (in most chapters focussing on one, sometimes on two or three countries) and are all based on qualitative data collection and analysis. The chapters offer very interesting in-depth views into the workings of individual CT programmes by adopting emic perspectives, i.e. showing how those actors who are locally involved make sense of what they are doing. They raise a multitude of important questions around, for example, intra-household and societal gendered effects or the role played by front-line civil servants. They show wider effects on individual and communal well-being, implications for indigenous communities, and how CTs are related to norms of responsibility. The reader thereby gets a good impression of what actually happens underneath the surface of this globally successful policy device. Some contributions also take up more directly the theme of diffusion by asking, for instance, what fictional expectations the global CT narrative created in Mexico and Argentina, or which de-historicising effects the involvement of transnational experts had on CTs in Egypt. Collectively, the contributors have produced a treasure of carefully derived context-sensitive knowledge about CT varieties, thereby accentuating how much of this phenomenon is still unstudied.
On a slightly critical note, that strength of the book also entails its weakness. While much is learned about how CTs play out differently in different contexts and how the global model changes in the process of translation, that contexts matter should not be an argument that needs to be made. Yet, this seems to be the finding to which the volume attributes greatest importance, and is indeed the main overriding theme connecting the chapters. This leaves one wondering who the book is speaking to; only those who would have assumed that contexts are secondary should need this kind of reminder, and those are probably – following the book’s criticism – development specialists rather than social scientists. The overall portrayal of contexts moreover leaves an ambiguous aftertaste. The negative way in which context is presented, as taking ‘revenge’, by triggering unintended outcomes, rings a bit of a derogatory bell. Even though universal models are problematized, too, critical anthropologists might have attributed relatively more attention to the question why CTs cry out for ‘revenge’ in the first place.
Overall, the book is nonetheless recommendable for anyone interested in the recent proliferation of a seemingly globalised social policy, that, however, is here shown to have very different faces, logics and effects in different localities across the global South.