Book Review: Cash Transfers in Context

Cash Transfers in Context: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Piccoli (2023). New York: Berghahn Books

Cash Transfers in Context: An Anthropological Perspective is a rich ethnographic survey of cash-transfer programs from around the world. Cash transfers, or the direct distribution of money to vulnerable groups, are celebrated as an efficient, transferable, and a measured solution to poverty –– but Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Piccoli’s new edited volume questions this conventional wisdom by examining how they actually unfold on ground. Through twelve cases spanning Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the book examines a wide range of actors –– indigenous women, ex-combatants, rural chiefs, frontline bureaucrats, and others –– to show that these programs are never uniform in practice. They are constantly re-interpreted on the ground, and the volume’s contributors capture this complexity through a collection of essays that highlight the value of context when implementing cash transfers. The volume stresses that standardized policies surrounding transfers never operate in a vacuum; once implemented, these policies are reshaped by local institutions, histories, and moral economies in ways that frequently alter or subvert their intended goals.

The first eight chapters look at conditional cash transfers or programs in which the payment of money is subject to a set of requirements on the part of beneficiaries. Olivier de Sardan begins by illustrating how policymakers in different Latin American countries enforce factors like “individual co-responsibility,” community work, donations, and participation in the banking system in exchange for receiving cash transfers. Rather than engaging with the institutional contexts that sustained flagship programs in Brazil and Mexico, a checklist of conditions was generated by experts and policymakers from organizations such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and others to promote a “universal” template for other countries. Olivier de Sardan critiques this homogenizing tendency and points out that once these generalized policies were transplanted, the models quickly confronted different social realities that failed to produce the policies’ desired outcomes.

Chapters 2 and 3 build on this critique as their authors challenge Brazilian and Mexican bureaucrats and policymakers’ misconceptions vis-à-vis the cash-transfer programs in their countries. Alejandro Agudo Sanchíz illustrates how Mexico’s Oportunidades was not sustained by the participating women’s sense of “individual co-responsibility” in rural Chiapas, a major condition in the universal template; instead, the program relied on the collective obligations of these women, stemming from their communities’ patronage and enforcement systems to ensure policy continuation. Likewise, Gregory Duff Morton argues that Brazil’s Bolsa Família did not impact all its recipients in the same way. He argues that while the program did empower women in comparatively prosperous households (that is, those near the eligibility limit), it also reinforced male authority for recipients from the poorest households.

The next five chapters turn to other Latin American countries, illustrating the challenges that emerged, once again, from experts’ generalizations of cash-transfer policies. These examples highlight that conditionalities do not establish a neutral template; the programs rather become sites of coercion, discipline, and moral judgment –– reinforcing hierarchies even as they make claims to empower participants. Maria Elisa Balen examines the embodied experience of queuing for payments in Colombia, where long hours under the hot sun turned what was framed as empowerment into a ritual of degradation. Norma Correa Aste, Terry Roopnaraine, and Amy Margolies show that in Peru women were coerced, under threat of expulsion from the Juntos program, into complying with extra-legal conditions such as mandatory contraceptive use. Likewise, Emmanuelle Piccoli and Bronwen Gillespie analyze how Peru’s Juntos stigmatized Andean lifestyles by compelling mothers to embody westernized ideals of hygiene and domesticity. Nora Nagels also addresses this tension in her chapter, wherein she highlights how Bolivia’s Bono programs dismissed indigenous wellness practices as backward and pushed for modern healthcare conditionalities.

The last four chapters examine unconditional and conditional transfers in African and Middle Eastern countries to reiterate the importance of context in conceiving and implementing policy frameworks. Fiona Samuels and Nicola Jones established how payments in Mozambique, Palestine, and Yemen can restore financial dignity to participants, but do little to improve overall wellbeing, which continues to decline amid ongoing violence and conflict. Hania Sholkamy shifts the analysis from beneficiaries to policymakers to claim that Egyptian officials’ failure to contextualize the working conditions of frontline workers results in poor implementation. Magali Chelpi-den Hamer details how cash-transfer policies that target specific marginalized groups in geographies with collective moral economies would backfire. She demonstrates that the re-integration policy for military veterans in Côte d’Ivoire has not been effective because ex-combatants do not think of cash as an individual resource. Rather, cash in this context has collective significance, as the ex-combatants quickly disperse it into a network of obligation and authority in order to negotiate debts and kinship obligations. Olivier de Sardan and Oumarou Hamani’s chapter on Niger focuses on a similar dynamic as they illustrate how cash transfers can target women in a beneficial manner –– but the cash often does not reach these women, as they pass it to their husbands who then share it with the community itself.

By addressing a variety of settings and subjects, the chapters in this volume collectively highlight that what development agencies would dismiss as “implementation gaps” are not minor flaws to be corrected but are the very processes by which cash transfers acquire meaning (4). These norms emerge in messy-but-real social relations, which cannot be simply turned into a list of conditions to produce an elusive “universal solution.” By juxtaposing state-led conditional programs in Latin America with NGO-driven or humanitarian transfers in Africa and the Middle East, Cash Transfers in Context underscores that the divergence between design and practice is frequently structural rather than accidental. Rather than engaging in simple judgements of success or failure, the book makes a strong case for cash transfers to be studied in all their complex attendant empirical realities.

To conclude, Cash Transfers in Context makes a vital contribution to anthropological work on development. In challenging the concept of a “universal model” without context, the book successfully demonstrates the value of ethnography to capture those dimensions of cash-transfer programs that often go undetected by quantitative evaluation modalities. By surveying these contexts across multiple field sites, Olivier de Sardan and Piccoli’s edited volume compels readers to take seriously the “social lives” of public policies and the limits of technocratic universalism. In addition to being of interest to anthropologists, this book will also find an audience among political scientists and policy researchers, as it proves to be a strong reminder against hegemonic modes of policy implementation.