On the global frontier of post-welfare policymaking : conditional cash transfers as fast social policy

The period since the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals¹ has been marked by an unprecedented attempt to build, advance, and consolidate a new hegemonic front in the field of social-welfare policy. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have been in the vanguard of this effort. CCTs provide modest cash payments only to those low-income households that "play by the rules," enrolling children in school, attending to domestic hygiene and appropriate healthcare, and building the human capital of the next generation. The CCT model encapsulates a new logic of social assistance quite different to the welfare-state rationalities of needs-based entitlement and universal coverage: it emphasizes socioeconomic promotion over social protection and long-term human capital investment over temporary relief; it advances the principles of reciprocal obligation and "co-responsibility" over universal human rights or top-down forms of social responsibility; it privileges interventions over generalized entitlements; and it inculcates active engagement over passive benefit receipt, an approach captured in the phrase often associated with these programs: "paying for good behavior."