Anti-poverty Policy as the Cultivation of Market Subjects: The Case of the Conditional Cash Transfer Program Oportunidades.
详细信息
文摘
My thesis explores the conceptual underpinnings of the acclaimed Mexican conditional cash transfer (CCT) program Oportunidades as a way of engaging broader debates about how anti-poverty policy is evolving in the wake of the World Bank's mid-1990s legitimacy crisis. I am interested in the behaviours and attitudes---or "subjectivities"---that Oportunidades attempts to cultivate amongst participants. Whereas the majority of CCT studies tend to focus on measuring the extent to which the programs "mold" beneficiaries into the categories of being prescribed by the program,my thesis is concerned with specifying and critically examining these categories. I use a hybrid neo-Gramscian,governmentality and critical feminist theoretical framework to probe how Oportunidades beneficiaries are constructed within World Bank and Mexican government discourse,as well as in external program evaluations. I argue that Oportunidades is underpinned by an agent-centred conception of poverty and that the program promotes a kind of gendered market-conducive subjectivity amongst beneficiaries. I conclude by exploring some of the implications of the CCT model.