ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews development's discursive and material interventions on the fiction of an improvement in which richer countries and their delegated institutions assist distant strangers and lessen the harshest impacts of skewed global wealth distributions. It examines the configuration of today's commons-impoverishment paradox, its institutionalisation, and affective penumbra, to discern the parameters of commoning in the field of development. The chapter explains the developmental responses to 'common humanity' as well as global patterns of disengagement. One key model for making capitalism inclusive is the practice of granting cash under strict conditions, involving ever-finer distinctions between subgroups of impoverished humanity, often on the basis of supposed vulnerability and non-capitalist positionalities. The chapter mentions the NGO efforts to ensure no-strings-attached cash to low-income households in Niger must thus be placed within a wider context. Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are highly gendered interventions as they rely upon hegemonic conceptions of female adults at the core of a domesticated sphere and masculine unreliability.
