Policy Representations in SGSY

Policy statements contain embedded representations of policy problems and prescribed solutions. This chapter analyses the arguments and the assumptions underlying SGSY policy statements what can be said and thought within the representational frame. It scrutinizes the normative construction of new policy subjectivities in SGSY and how empirical representations of these subjectivities may diverge from them. By paying simultaneous attention to the gendered nature of these representations, arguments, assumptions and subjectivities. The primary data used to analyse normative representations include official documents pertaining to both SGSY and its precursor, the IRDP: policy guidelines and their amendments, committee reports and government resolutions and circulars. It concludes with the analysis of policy representations in SGSY through the lens of Fraser's criteria of redistribution, recognition and representation. Interlocking policy arguments and their underlying assumptions produce the effect of an apparently irrefutable solution within SGSY to the problem of poverty, to the exclusion of alternatives.