ABSTRACT
This book focuses on various rural populations across different countries throughout Latin America. In the introduction, we begin by discussing ‘Latin America’s CCT moment’, a period of about 15 years before the commodity bust of 2014, during which time conditional cash transfers (CCTs) rapidly spread throughout the region. We suggest that today, as CCTs have become normalized, it is instructive to explore the social worlds that CCTs enacted during this period. In the second section we argue for a heuristic shift from the focus on whether or not CCTs work, and from analyzing them through a supply-and-demand framework, toward looking at how CCTs work. We illustrate the usefulness of such a shift through discussing what are commonly considered as gaps or failures in policy implementation. By reconsidering gaps as productive, and highlighting the place of information systems and financial technology in CCT mechanisms, we conclude that CCTs should be viewed as a form of governance. In the final section we argue that, from their very inception, Latin American CCTs effect an erasure of rural orientations, aspirations and forms of social life, assuming the universality of urban experience by aligning cash transfer mechanisms toward it.
