Paying for good behavior : cash transfer policies in the wild

The period since the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals has been marked by an unprecedented attempt to build, advance, and consolidate a new hegemonic front in the globalizing field of social-assistance policy. Conditional cash transfer (cct) programs have been in the vanguard of this effort. Often styled as a Latin American “invention,” the operational principles and programming practices of ccts have been actively coproduced, almost since their inception, by the multilateral development agencies and their roving representatives. They have since spread throughout South America, and indeed to every continent, at a prolific rate. In less than a decade, what began as a pair of geographically isolated experiments (in Mexico and Brazil) has become established, in effect, as the default setting for antipoverty reform: “The international development community has clearly defined ccts as the new norm” (Sugiyama 2011: 264).