Gender Equality in Conditional Cash Transfer Designs

Few aspects of social policy have been more controversial than the effects of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) on gender relations and policy outcomes on gender relations are linked to policy designs. Development and social policy communities have recognized gender equality as a cornerstone of development and social progress. Nonetheless, designing policy to integrate gender equality goals into social policies is rendered that much more complicated as and when these policies travel. In Mexico in 1997, the first CCT, Progresa, looked quite different than CCTs look today. Embedded in the design was Affirmative Action geared toward girls, as was a clearly enunciated concern about the program's effects on female empowerment. For the 2005 Peruvian CCT, Juntos, the story was very different. Its design did not include any gender equality goals and it reproduced long-standing social policy legacies of gendered exclusions. Therefore, this book is about the alteration of Conditional Cash Transfer designs in relation to gender equality goals as they have made their way through Latin America as well as through the World Bank. This book aims to account for “the fading goal of gender equality” (Jenson 2015) across time as part of this regional trajectory. In short, it tracks the how and the why of this trajectory in relation to gender equality goals.

Nora Nagels is an associate professor of political science at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She earned her PhD in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute, Geneva in 2013. She pursued postdoctoral training at the Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance in the Political Science department at the Université de Montréal. She co-founded l’Équipe de recherche sur l’inclusion et la gouvernance en Amérique latine (ERIGAL). Her research focuses on gender, the World Bank, citizenship and social policies in Latin America. She has recently published on comparative politics, conditional cash transfers, development, citizenship and gender in leading journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics; Social Politics; Social Policy & Administration, Social Policy & Society, Politica and Sociedad and Revue internationale de politique comparée.