Mothers at the Service of the New Poverty Agenda: Progresa/Oportunidades, Mexico's Conditional Transfer Programme

Author: Molyneux, Maxine

Source: Social Policy and Administration, Volume 40, Number 4, August 2006 , pp. 425-449(25)

Buy & download fulltext article:

Price: $48.00 plus tax (Refund Policy)

Abstract:

This article considers some of the changes and continuities in social protection in Latin America through a focus on the ways in which motherhood is positioned as key to the success of the new anti-poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship cash transfer programme known as Progresa/Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico in 1997 and now being widely adopted in the region. Characterized by some commentators as a quintessentially neo-liberal programme, it is argued that Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier maternalist social policy approaches with the conditional, co-responsibility models associated with the recent approaches to social welfare and poverty relief endorsed by international policy actors. In the first section, the gendered assumptions that have governed Latin American social policy are described; the second outlines social policy provision in Latin America and identifies the key elements of the new approaches to poverty; and the third critically examines the broader implications of the Mexican programme's selective and gendered construction of social need premised, as it is, on re-traditionalizing gendered roles and responsibilities.

Keywords: Anti-poverty programmes; Conditional cash transfers; Maternalism; Motherhood; Latin America; Progresa/Oportunidades

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2006.00497.x

Affiliations: 1: Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, 31 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9HA

Publication date: 2006-08-01