ABSTRACT
Crafted under the logic of behavioral economics, conditional cash transfers were implemented to modify conduct through the programs’ so-called ‘conditionalities’. Aimed to induce behavioral changes, these conditionalities are also redesigning money as a reinforcer for particular reproductive behaviors. Based on fieldwork at the Inter-American Development Bank and in a Mayan-speaking rural community in Mexico, this chapter compares the different roles of money in generative processes. While popular concerns and experts’ prognoses operationalize the transferred cash as a vital token for human reproduction and for the emergence of human capital in idealized rural and urban households, some mothers who receive and administer the transfers believe that they exchange their own generative attributes for the money they receive. In each of these three perspectives, the cash transferred equates its own nature to a vital process of body-capital accumulation.
