What is it about?
Despite the centrality of children in CCTs, their voices have remained absent from the literature. Like most research on CCTs, my work had focused on beneficiary mothers and households. In this chapter, I employed a generational approach, decentring adults' experiences and perspectives to create the conceptual space to bring in children. This ethnographic study is illustrative of how CCTs reconfigure the relational position of 'poor' children within the household and society.
Featured Image
Photo by Roi Dimor on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In this chapter, I initiated a discussion on some of the many complex relations between age, gender, state and society restructured through new forms of welfare provisioning, namely by conditional cash transfers. Impact evaluations dominate the literature on CCTs, e.g. effects of CCTs on children’s school attendance, performance and their involvement in child labour. This concern with children and children’s activities is limited to children’s assumed future role of productive adults and leaves unaddressed how CCTs reconfigure childhood in a profoundly age-normative fashion and how it affects children’s relational position in society.
Perspectives
My work goes against the grain of most research on social assistance that is mostly evaluative and concerned with developmental outcomes, e.g. poverty reduction, nutrition, schooling. It is part of a cumulative research agenda that deals with the normative aspects of social assistance targeted to those in need, as exemplified by conditional cash transfer programmes or CCTs. The increased recognition of social assistance having an impact on social and power dynamics justifies this focus, as it is a dimension not often explored in the specialised literature.
Dr. Maria Gabriela Palacio Ludena
Universiteit Leiden
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Little People, Big Words: ‘Generationating’ Conditional Cash Transfers in Urban Ecuador, January 2016, Nature,
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-55623-3_11.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
