ABSTRACT
Since the first evaluations of the Mexican social assistance scheme PROGRESA came out at the turn of the millennium, policymakers, academics, international financial institutions and the media have turned their attention to the “novel and innovative” social policy framework, which came to be labelled conditional cash transfers (CCTs). By now CCTs have been established as one of the most well-known policy brands, and since 1997 a variant of CCTs has been implemented in more than 60 countries. The chapter acknowledges that global proliferation of a policy is fundamentally linked to its story of origin. The chapter problematises the prevailing narrative of the CCTs and critically assesses the origin and uniqueness of PROGRESA (later named Oportunidades and subsequently Prospera). The chapter argues that in a process of domestication, global policy norms were encapsulated and codified in the PROGRESA program, which was then presented as a national innovation by omitting exogenous influences and actors from the official story of the program. This codification was then marketed to other countries by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank as a “model” to follow.
