ABSTRACT
Drawing on longitudinal fieldwork from 1996 to 2017 in a village in the Ilocos region, the northwestern part of Luzon, this chapter aims to explore the persistence of, and changes in, livelihood strategies of low-income households in the rural Philippines. Special attention will be paid to the recent implementation of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) as well as, to a lesser degree, the introduction of microfinancing in the village within the past decade. Its central concern is the way such new social policy and aid programs, which aim to alleviate poverty by creating active, empowered, and responsible individuals and families “through education,” have affected the configuration of “the social” in the rural village that has a long history of overseas migration. It demonstrates that, while a new mode of conduct for offering security against various uncertainties and risks has become observable, the poorer households in the village have actively maintained their earlier livelihood strategies, as well as that the villagers have been also exploring alternative forms of mutual aid practices among themselves to secure their livelihoods, amid the neoliberal restructuring of the government.
