Strategies of conditional cash transfers and the tactics of resistance

Jeff Garmany

Environment and Planning A, 2017, vol. 49, issue 2, 372-388

Abstract: This article examines how poor people negotiate obligations placed on them by social welfare initiatives. More specifically, it considers conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), and the ways beneficiaries harness program conditionalities to make demands on authorities, in some cases even enacting subtle forms of resistance to state governance. Drawing from Michel de Certeau, it argues that while CCT conditionalities function as strategies of state development, they are not always/already under exclusive state control. Marginalized groups like CCT recipients can tactically harness these conditionalities. Through such tactics, poor people make demands on the state and deflect program obligations, but in calculated ways that avoid exposing them to greater vulnerability. Drawing from empirical data collected as part of a case study in rural northeastern Brazil, this article contributes to existent bodies of literature on CCTs, governance, and critical development studies in the 21st century.

Keywords: Conditional cash transfers; development; the state; rural; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X16672453 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:49:y:2017:i:2:p:372-388

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16672453

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().