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Redistributive Policies That Target Poverty and Inequalities: Exploration of Socially Inclusive Vs. Socially Corrosive Transformations
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC09 Social Transformations and Sociology of Development (host committee)
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
This session explores social policies that target poverty and inequalities within development transformations and trajectories that occur during our current era of authoritarian, anti-redistributionist, classist, racist, and misogynist political irruptions and interruptions.
We complement the work being done by RC09 scholars on the problem of political voice, inequality, development, and social transformations with qualitative and critical analysis of redistributive policies and categorization processes. These policies and processes include, among others, consequential and relational effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs), categorical equalisation and categorical differentiation or cleavage. We interrogate their proposed role as compensatory and palliative income redistributive measures, and as socio-economic redistributive measures with potentially socially transformative effects.
Redistributive programmes rose to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s, but since the 2010s they have experienced reversals and unanticipated dynamic transformations towards anti-inclusionary and reactionary trajectories. Whereas some redistributive policies are publicized as inclusive, they tend to ignore intersectionality and other inherent social realities (such as sexism and racism), and through means intended and unintended, these policies can become socially corrosive. This session aims to uncover and explain how policies and process dynamics create political path-dependencies.