Decoding the protocol: data and social assistance in Ecuador

Abstract

Under the banner of rights-based development, it was expected that contemporary social protection policies and programmes would bring about the full enjoyment of universal rights of citizenship. Instead, these have preferred temporary and conditional claims to resources, prioritising ever-narrower targeting schemes. This shift in policymaking has informed a different disciplinary moral technology of statecraft brought about by conditional cash transfers (CCTs). The central argument of this article is that the normative foundations of CCTs, preoccupied with the technicality of targeting, prioritise moral individualism over issues of recognition and redistribution. Norms embedded in these programmes seem to be more concerned with regulating rather than protecting the poor, conditioning their social and political identities and enacting different forms of economic positioning and social membership. The article traces the normative foundations of the Ecuadorian cash transfer programme Bono de Desarrollo Humano and how they structure social and political identities. The use of ethnographic work, interviews with various generations of cash transfers beneficiary women, and documentary analysis of policies and reports provide the empirical basis for the study of the political economy and normative dimensions of narrowly targeted modalities of social protection programmes. The central argument is that the normative foundations of the BDH programme, targeted and individualised in nature, have limited prospects in terms of recognition and cross-class solidarity. Processes of social stratification and sorting are found to worsen feelings of unreservedness among beneficiary women. Targeted modalities of social protection require beneficiary mothers to provide legible proof of their condition of poverty periodically, and their behaviour is regulated by the application of rigid data protocols, exposing them to corrective measures in case of illegibility, e.g., delisting or 'graduation'. As a result, beneficiary mothers do not see themselves as claimants of rights, a consequence of processes of marginalisation sedimented in a highly unequal society, and exacerbated by the punitive and divisive eligibility protocol used to sort and select CCT beneficiaries.