Gender, citizenship and new approaches to poverty relief: The case of Argentine CCT strategies

TABBUSH, CONSTANZA

The Gendered Impacts of Liberalization: Towards Embedded Liberalism?

Routledge. The Routledge/UNRISD Series in Gender and Development

Lugar: Londres y Nueva York; Año: 2009; p. 290 - 326

In recent years, social policy has attained renewed attention in international policy circles and donor agencies. Efforts to fight poverty in Latin America have been articulated in targeted and demand-led social protection programmes that provide assistance to poor families conditional on the performance of socially valued activities. Observers highlight some of their innovative features compared to previous forms of social protection: extended coverage of poor households, a multidimensional view of deprivation, defining beneficiaries as co-responsible partners, providing a special role for families in the fight against poverty, and targeting of women as main cash recipients  (Serrano, 2005). Despite the fact that these programmes offer an unprecedented and much needed support to vulnerable sectors of the population, their gender assumptions and prescribed roles for women and other household members need careful scrutiny.   This chapter considers Conditional Cash Transfer (CCTs) programmes set up in Argentina after the economic crisis of 2001, providing a gender analysis of their core assumptions, outcomes and limitations. The analysis will be based on a comparison of models of social protection embedded in two CCT initiatives: “Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados: Derecho Familiar a la Inclusión Social” and its successor programme, “Familias por la Inclusión Social”. The first one equates poverty with lack of employment, visualises work as the exit strategy out of  deprivation, and has a universalistic vision that leaves gender –and gender implications in access to resources- unproblematised. The second programmes sees poverty in terms of weak human capital formation, it builds upon women’s traditional caring roles within households, and views the reproductive work of women as the main channel for building up the “human capital” endowments of new generations. Both programmes assume and encourage particular constructions of gendered identities and practices. As such, these policies contribute to both constrain and open sets of opportunities for women, depending on how the implicit notion of women’s empowerment is articulated and how gender differences and responsibilities are conceptualised; in some cases this entails placing additional burdens on women.   The key objectives of this paper are: to consider the opportunities offered to women on the basis of  these recent programmes; their embedded assumptions, rhetoric and symbolic construction of gender roles and identities in managing poverty; and their outcomes in terms of gender relations and inequalities.   Drawing on the results of this particular case study, the research will expand on and reflect upon the multiple gender implications of liberal forms of social protection that have been developed in the region, hand in hand, with the New Poverty Agenda. Finally, concepts designed to describe the gender assumptions of CCTs in Latin America - for instance, the feminization of the management and responsibility for dealing with poverty (Chant 2006) or the re-traditionalisation of social policies (Molyneux 2006) – are discussed in relation to the empirical evidence provided.