Progressive Social Policy Demands Vs Market-State Pragmatism: A Comparative-Historical Analysis of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Brazil and the Philippines

This paper undertakes a comparative/historical analysis of two Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, Brazil’s Programa Bolsa Família (BFP) and the Philippines’ 4Ps/Pantawid to assess social movement demands in relation to market-state priorities. CCTs emerged in Brazil and Mexico in the mid-1990s in response to deleterious structural adjustment policy implementation. CCTs target the poorest families to provide them with regular subsistence cash payments on compliance with specified health and education conditionalities. How well do CCTs institutionalise progressive social policy stipulations as opposed to cost-effectively assuaging them while increasing the role and space for market-oriented domination of social protection? A comparative case study analysis of these large scale CCTs is compelling because the social movement-based Workers Party in Brazil won electoral power and implemented BFP nation-wide in 2003 on constitutional, rights-based grounds, which consolidated its power. By contrast, the Philippines’ centre-right Lakas CMD party of Gloria Arroyo introduced the 4Ps/Pantawid CCT project in 2007 as a top down, elite-driven project for political ends, including Millennium Development Goal compliance. Begnino Aquino’s Liberal Party expanded Pantawid partly to reconstitute radical social movement demands as a function of state-market pragmatism. Political change in each institutional setting halted these very different approaches in 2016. The paper sets out the comparative conditions of economic and social inequality in each case up to the respective introduction of CCTs. It then maps the respective strategies, phases and junctures in CCT implementation in relation to radical social movement demands and reciprocal state responses. The comparative-historical approach thus generates insights into how progressive social demands are subject to varieties of recapture and reformulation within neoliberal dynamics. Comparing these CCTs enables inquiry into real versus managed inequalities and poverty reduction in each case and the scope for future social movement engagement.