Unjust Conditions: Women's Work and the Hidden Cost of Cash Transfer Programs by Tara Patricia Cookson

Author:Tara Patricia Cookson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic Conditions, development, Economic Development, History, Latin America, South America, Political Science, Public Policy, Economic Policy, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, Rural, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780520969520
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:48:21.001000+00:00

CONCLUSION

Most research on CCTs questions if the programs achieve high levels of compliance, rather than how. CCTs are not efficient when viewed from the perspective of the mothers who walk and wait for “a little bit of help” from the state. Juntos was rife with gendered inefficiencies. The time that mothers spent walking and waiting bolstered the administrative capacities of the Juntos program. This was time that could have otherwise been dedicated to subsistence farming, to assisting children with schoolwork, to weaving or cooking or helping a neighbor, to leisure. Juntos’s gendered inefficiencies were made visible to me only after I accompanied women in their more mundane, everyday activities. Yet it was not only that mothers were asked to support a well-intentioned program and that their time was sacrificed, or even wasted, in the process. The wasting of women’s time had the unintended consequence of putting women in their place.

This chapter could be read as evidence of failure in the implementation of an otherwise good policy. In this sense, the generalizability of my observations about managing up hangs on yet another empirical question—whether local managers’ shortcomings were due to local discretion or to how the CCT was designed. It could be that mothers needed to manage up because their individual local managers were lazy or recalcitrant, or because these managers believed that the women had nothing better to do. An alternative explanation is that CCTs are designed in a way that makes it impossible for local managers to do the job that experts in Lima think they are doing. It could be that CCTs are designed in a way that relies on the unacknowledged contributions of women’s unpaid labor. To examine these possible explanations, we must look at what it is that local managers are expected to do, as well as what they actually do.

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