Conditional Cash Transfers in Brazil and the Philippines: Reducing or Masking Economic, Political and Social Inequalities?

This paper employs a comparative-historical analysis of Conditional Cash Transfers in Brazil and the Philippines to consider problems of economic, political and social exclusion for the most marginalized sectors. CCTs aimed to conditionally match redistribution measures with human capital development, especially in health and education. Introduced in Mexico and Brazil in the mid-1990s, CCTs enabled Latin American states to address entrenched economic inequality on constitutional and rights bases, and thus to attempt reducing social and political inequalities. Brazil’s Workers’ Party implemented Programa Bolsa Família (BFP) in 2003, which helped institutionalise its transition to election-winning political party. Moreover, by 2015 some 64 countries had implemented CCTs. However, feminist and leftist scholars of social protection have pointed out that CCTs impair opportunities for women beneficiaries, add unpaid labour responsibilities, and retrench rights as a basis for social protection. Since all beneficiary data is recorded and non-compliance is punished with competitive exclusion from the system’s benefits, CCTs thus appear as a relatively cost-effective sorting system for behaviour modification of the poor. From this perspective, CCTs do not reduce real economic inequalities but perpetuate political fragmentation, enlarge the space for market penetration of social protection, and generate a data-driven dragnet over the lives, livelihoods and behaviours of the poorest sectors. How has this adverse re-incorporation of a recent social protection innovation into neoliberal structures of domination taken place and what are the prospects for marginalized social and political groups? This comparative study of the world’s largest and third largest CCTs provides insights into three important factors: bottom up versus top down programme implementation, the degree and timing of IFI lender involvement, and positioning of the middle classes in relation to the 2016 political transitions. Prospectively, CCTs may be relevant to future Brazilian electoral contests but become subsumed into clientelistic market-state relations in the Philippines.