5b971ef5-d1c4-4d01-b590-df9cffefedfb202606090112501395Depositor Namedepositor_email@address.comRUA Metadata ExporterTara PatriciaCooksonCambridge Universityhttps://ror.org/013meh722Women’s Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer ProgramsUnjust Conditions follows the lives and labors of poor mothers in rural Peru, richly documenting the ordeals they face to participate in mainstream poverty alleviation programs. Championed by behavioral economists and the World Bank, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are praised as efficient mechanisms for changing poor people’s behavior. While rooted in good intentions and dripping with the rhetoric of social inclusion, CCT programs’ successes ring hollow, based solely on metrics for children’s attendance at school and health appointments. Looking beyond these statistics reveals a host of hidden costs for the mothers who meet the conditions. With a poignant voice and keen focus on ethnographic research, Tara Patricia Cookson turns the reader’s gaze to women’s care work in landscapes of grossly inadequate state investment, cleverly drawing out the tensions between social inclusion and conditionality."This is an outstanding book—a stunning indictment of expert schemes that overlook lived realities in order to conjure the appearance of success. Lucid, incisive, and compelling—bravo!" TANIA LI, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto"Cookson´s Unjust Conditions stands out as a genuine, major contribution addressing important blind spots frequently neglected in this debate. A must-read for scholars, activists and policymakers committed to combating poverty." LENA LAVINAS, Professor of Welfare Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro"If there was a need for demonstrating the value of ‘slow research’ for clear policy thinking and informed practice, Cookson provides a powerful and compelling proof."SHAHRA RAZAVI, Chief of Research and Data, UN Women"Unjust Conditions is a book written for exactly these times, as we collectively demand an end to violence against women in all its forms. Cookson takes us on a journey to find out the truth about conditional aid, introducing us to women who debunk gendered myths underpinning CCTs." JANE BARRY, activist and author of Rising up in Response: Women's Rights Activism in Conflict"Cookson’s research gives voice to women living with unjust 'shadow conditions' imposed by CCTs. This book poses compelling questions about identity, power, wealth and justice and challenges us to take the time to listen and identify possibilities for meaningful change." MARTHA CHOE, former Chief Administrative Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation“In this much-needed ethnography, Cookson shows the importance of looking beyond the statistics of short-term poverty reduction to shed light on the hidden, unintended effects on people’s lives and how these undermine long-term social change.” JELKE BOESTEN, author of Sexual Violence in War and Peace: Gender and Post-conflict Justice in Peru“Cookson’s book brings us to the heart of the workings of contemporary social assistance. This major contribution reveals how inequality is reproduced through the web of social relations these programs create.” STÉPHANIE ROUSSEAU, Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú"Through the tripartite lens of care, power, and geography, Unjust Conditions reveals how CCTs consolidate a post-welfare world in which a redistributive politics of unconditional cash transfers is silenced as a viable alternative in global development debates." VICTORIA LAWSON, Professor of Geography, University of Washington"Delving below rosy outcome data, Cookson convincingly demonstrates how the globally popular CCT relies upon, rather than challenges, deep-seated relations of power" ELISABETH JAY FRIEDMAN, Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies, University of San Francisco"Cookson’s book is a most welcome contribution to our understanding of CCTs, casting important light on how they work on the ground and what onerous demands they can place on beneficiaries and poorly paid social workers. This book has important lessons for policymakers and scholars alike." MAXINE MOLYNEUX, author of The Social and Political Potential of Cash Transfers"CCTs have been evaluated by sophisticated statistical methods that ignore moral issues. This book adds to the critique of conditionality and overhyped evaluative methods. It also adds to the demand that the concept of work be radically changed so that care work is given its proper recognition." GUY STANDING, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous ClassTARA PATRICIA COOKSON is a SSHRC Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Ladysmith, a women’s equality venture. Her research on gender, international development, and social justice has been published in a variety of public and policy outlets as well as in academic journals such as Antipode.Unjust Conditions follows the lives and labors of poor mothers in rural Peru, richly documenting the ordeals they face to participate in mainstream poverty alleviation programs. Championed by behavioral economists and the World Bank, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are praised as efficient mechanisms for changing poor people’s behavior. While rooted in good intentions and dripping with the rhetoric of social inclusion, CCT programs’ successes ring hollow, based solely on metrics for children’s attendance at school and health appointments. Looking beyond these statistics reveals a host of hidden costs for the mothers who meet the conditions. With a poignant voice and keen focus on ethnographic research, Tara Patricia Cookson turns the reader’s gaze to women’s care work in landscapes of grossly inadequate state investment, cleverly drawing out the tensions between social inclusion and conditionality."This is an outstanding book—a stunning indictment of expert schemes that overlook lived realities in order to conjure the appearance of success. Lucid, incisive, and compelling—bravo!" TANIA LI, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto"Cookson´s Unjust Conditions stands out as a genuine, major contribution addressing important blind spots frequently neglected in this debate. A must-read for scholars, activists and policymakers committed to combating poverty." LENA LAVINAS, Professor of Welfare Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro"If there was a need for demonstrating the value of ‘slow research’ for clear policy thinking and informed practice, Cookson provides a powerful and compelling proof."SHAHRA RAZAVI, Chief of Research and Data, UN Women"Unjust Conditions is a book written for exactly these times, as we collectively demand an end to violence against women in all its forms. Cookson takes us on a journey to find out the truth about conditional aid, introducing us to women who debunk gendered myths underpinning CCTs." JANE BARRY, activist and author of Rising up in Response: Women's Rights Activism in Conflict"Cookson’s research gives voice to women living with unjust 'shadow conditions' imposed by CCTs. This book poses compelling questions about identity, power, wealth and justice and challenges us to take the time to listen and identify possibilities for meaningful change." MARTHA CHOE, former Chief Administrative Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation“In this much-needed ethnography, Cookson shows the importance of looking beyond the statistics of short-term poverty reduction to shed light on the hidden, unintended effects on people’s lives and how these undermine long-term social change.” JELKE BOESTEN, author of Sexual Violence in War and Peace: Gender and Post-conflict Justice in Peru“Cookson’s book brings us to the heart of the workings of contemporary social assistance. This major contribution reveals how inequality is reproduced through the web of social relations these programs create.” STÉPHANIE ROUSSEAU, Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú"Through the tripartite lens of care, power, and geography, Unjust Conditions reveals how CCTs consolidate a post-welfare world in which a redistributive politics of unconditional cash transfers is silenced as a viable alternative in global development debates." VICTORIA LAWSON, Professor of Geography, University of Washington"Delving below rosy outcome data, Cookson convincingly demonstrates how the globally popular CCT relies upon, rather than challenges, deep-seated relations of power" ELISABETH JAY FRIEDMAN, Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies, University of San Francisco"Cookson’s book is a most welcome contribution to our understanding of CCTs, casting important light on how they work on the ground and what onerous demands they can place on beneficiaries and poorly paid social workers. This book has important lessons for policymakers and scholars alike." MAXINE MOLYNEUX, author of The Social and Political Potential of Cash Transfers"CCTs have been evaluated by sophisticated statistical methods that ignore moral issues. This book adds to the critique of conditionality and overhyped evaluative methods. It also adds to the demand that the concept of work be radically changed so that care work is given its proper recognition." GUY STANDING, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous ClassTARA PATRICIA COOKSON is a SSHRC Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the founder of Ladysmith, a women’s equality venture. Her research on gender, international development, and social justice has been published in a variety of public and policy outlets as well as in academic journals such as Antipode.05042018978-0-520-29699-2978-0-520-96952-0978-0-520-96952-0978-0-520-96952-0University of California PressCaliforniahttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/10.1525/luminos.49https://www.luminosoa.org/books/m/10.1525/luminos.49https://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/2b021c01-8f73-4481-aaaa-89670f3a025d.pdfhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/2b021c01-8f73-4481-aaaa-89670f3a025d.pdfDominant narratives in global development locate blame for persistent poverty in households that fail to adequately invest in children’s health and education. Conditional cash transfers are the latest “development panacea.” Implemented in over fifty countries and reaching nearly half a billion people, CCTs are lauded as “efficient”: with a simple cash incentive, families meet conditions related to health care and education. Peru’s CCT Juntos intervenes in the rural Andes and Amazon regions and is considered a resounding success: 96 percent of families meet program conditions. I introduce the feminist methodology of institutional ethnography, a distinct approach to research that accounts for women’s unpaid care work and holds their well-being central to the analysis.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.ahttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/e4a57850-c2a0-4554-a4b1-dfaa7c4cbf08.pdfThis chapter juxtaposes a narrative about social inclusion with the metrics used to measure program impact. In the air-conditioned offices and conference rooms of Lima, policy makers and state bureaucrats make decisions that impact program implementation in rural regions. Juntos’s success is measured against a handful of quantitative indicators that create blind spots around poor-quality health and education services. This measurement obsession has unintended gendered consequences. By depoliticizing and rendering technical the problem of poverty, policy makers set into motion a set of practices that mask the very exclusions Juntos seeks to redress.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.bhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/1bcbc6fa-c8af-4cd1-89de-8acb50a2287f.pdfWomen’s experiences of accessing health and education services challenge the policy narratives around co-responsibility (the shared responsibility between household and state for overcoming poverty) and conditionality (the premise that women need a nudge to responsibly mother their children). Persistent staff shortages, discrimination, the low quality of instruction, and inadequate infrastructure reveal the state’s failure to redress persistent inequalities in the distribution of basic resources in rural places. While women’s compliance in meeting conditions was monitored, there was no simultaneous audit of the state’s compliance. Women’s compliance is disciplined by material need and notions of “responsible motherhood.”0504201810.1525/luminos.49.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.chttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/1adac768-22d3-4d51-bac3-a5494d0280db.pdfThe experiences of CCT recipients reveal uneven geographies and the embodied, tedious work of “walking and waiting.” Juntos local managers are required to travel between villages and collect compliance data. Yet the sheer number of households they manage means that they require women bear the cost of state underinvestment as they travel by foot, patiently queue for services, and “manage up” to ensure that their compliance is registered. Walking and waiting puts rural mothers “in their place”—it reminds them of their lowly social status and reveals a policy that fails to account for women’s time, mobility, and care commitments.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.dhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/e502ebe6-616d-47f2-9067-775e783654fc.pdfRural mothers perform various forms of additional labor as CCT recipients, revealing slippages between paid and unpaid labor and gendered inefficiencies in poverty-alleviation programs. Along with support from clinic and health staff, local mangers rely on Mother Leaders to enforce program conditions. While this reliance on Mother Leaders was unplanned at the national level of policy making, I show how Juntos is unviable without the work of these women. The state relies on women’s time and willingness to discipline their neighbors to make up for persistent underinvestment in public institutions and services.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.ehttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/f0446ba0-206c-4c5d-8ebe-0bbb65dc0128.pdfLocal managers and other authorities threaten women with suspension if they do not perform additional tasks to earn the cash incentive. These “shadow conditions” include participating in political parades, using the state day care, cooking for school lunch programs, building latrines, giving birth in hospitals, contributing to the medical costs of a neighbor’s broken leg, and many other things—as one woman said, “doing whatever the local manager tells me to.” In the context of uneven development, inequality, and discrimination, conditionality becomes a tool for more powerful groups to implement their own projects of improvement among less-powerful groups. While invisible in official documents, shadow conditions reveal the coercive power of incentives and are an exclusionary outcome of making aid conditional.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.fhttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/10294ac3-32ff-4172-9c87-e3a1616fb4e5.pdfDominant actors in international development and global health urge the implementation of “adequate” cash transfer programs to enhance human capital, eradicate poverty, and reduce inequalities. Yet poor rural women’s experiences illustrate that conditionality is an unjust means for achieving these goals. I turn here to consider how women’s experiences might reorient optimistic discussions about the potential for unconditional cash transfers to drive what some have imagined as a “new politics of distribution.” As this book argues, without a substantive investment in improving the basic conditions of people’s lives, cash only alleviates some of the costs of caring.0504201810.1525/luminos.49.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/chapters/m/10.1525/luminos.49.ghttps://www.luminosoa.org/books/54/files/a38473c9-35e9-4abe-bc99-284d6eaa17f3.pdf