Universal social protection or conditional cash transfers: The disputes over labeling. just a word game? Protección social universal o transferencias monetarias condicionadas: Las disputas por el nombre. Zsólo un juego de palabras?

The field of social policy is often subject to different currents of opinion that establish certain categories and make them compulsory for any analysis or policy design. When studying social policy from the governmentality perspective, one can understand this phenomenon by assuming that they entail power relations linked to regimes of knowledge. When looking into Latin American social policies, the analysis of these relations should account for the conditions of subordination of production and re-production of "poverty knowledge" in our countries.  Nonetheless, in recent years, there seems to have been a case of "inversion" in the direction of the traveling of ideas. That is the case for "conditional cash transfers", that after being experimented in LA have been replicated in central countries ( vgr. the Opportunity program in New York since 2007).

In our presentation we will build the argument that this category ("conditional cash transfer") becomes the battleground for the labeling of recent changes in social intervention in LA. In this sense, one wonders whether the spread of these schemes by international agencies represent a "recognition" of the limitations of neoliberal strategies in the war against poverty, or an attempt to colonize and domesticate the potential political and cultural implications of an inclusive strategy in terms of “social rights”.  In order to do so, we analyze the experiences of Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

As we discuss in our work, the category "conditional cash transfer" assimilates experience with very diverse origins and perspectives, while neglecting that alternative groupings might interpret programs such as universal child allowance in Argentina in light of other experiences developed in previous crises. In particular, we will refer to Aid for Dependant Children designed by Roosevelt in 1935.