Neoliberal Welfare? Conditionality, Experimentality in Globalizing Social Policy

Neoliberal welfare?  This oxymoronic formulation might be an appropriate way to characterize the diverse pattern of regulatory experimentation that has been underway, since the late 1990s, with a family of policies known as “conditional cash transfers” or CCTs.  An innovative form of “responsibilizing” social-welfare policy pioneered in Brazil and Mexico, CCT programs now operate in more than 50 countries, including most of Latin America and parts of Africa and Asia, as well as in a number of experimental sites in North America and Europe.  CCTs condition modest cash payments on household compliance with a range of program rules, primarily relating to educational participation and healthcare.  They have been represented in some circles as post-Washington consensus policies, possibly even “post-neoliberal” methods of governance, because they signal a renewed concern with large-scale poverty alleviation, coupled with moderate incursions into social redistribution and women’s empowerment.  In other respects, they might be considered to be elaborations or extensions of arch-neoliberal rationality, since CCTs internalize an economistic logic of strictly targeted human-capital development, while devolving and privatizing risk, and augmenting incentive-based approaches to social-welfare à la workfare. 

Based an on analysis of the moving landscape of CCT experimentation at the international scale, the paper reflects on the theoretical and political status of these much vaunted policies, positioned as they are at the thresholds of neoliberalization—boundary conditions that might be indicative of the exhaustion and transcendence of post-welfare policymaking, but which in other respects might be read as a bold elaboration of the mutating practice that is marketized governance.  The question of whether progressive “arts of government” might be cultivated on this shifting landscape is a challenging and potentially consequential one, since different facets or fronts of the same policy field appear to be spawning, at the same time, a range of practical opportunities for late- and alt-neoliberal experimentation:  on the one side lies the predominant model of technocratically designed and managed programs, epitomised by Mexico’s Oportunidades, that are defined by strict approaches to conditionality and targeting; on the other is a more motley collection of less-conditional programs, some of which recognize right-based rationalities, while others even resemble basic or citizens’ income measures.  Prediction, of course, is hazardous.  But at a minimum it is necessary to acknowledge the polymorphic character of these leading-edge experiments in transnational social-welfare policy, the contradictory nature of both conservative and more progressive models, and the fundamental openness of future pathways.