ABSTRACT
While many conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are couched in well-meaning rhetoric of rights and social inclusion, critical ethnographic work has documented how easily policy makers can lose sight of these original aims when measures of ‘success’ are reduced to a handful of quantitative metrics related to compliance with program conditions. Ultimately this can result in systematic blind spots among policy makers, in which metrics about women’s behavior come to replace a substantive focus on the quality of state services and the difficult conditions in which poor people live. This chapter argues that systematic blind spots also structure how local CCT implementers interact with poor women in rural areas. Drawing on an institutional ethnography of Peru’s CCT program Juntos, I consider specific scenes in which local implementers called on poor women to feed their children, wash their hands, or generate savings, failing to acknowledge the basic living conditions that made these activities obviously difficult and particularly costly for rural women. While such instances may initially seem like simple failures of empathy among local implementers, the argument that they stem from programmatic blind spots places them in broader critical perspective.
