Paper short abstract:

This chapter explores how CCTs normalise certain types of familial roles and how they may reproduce social norms. We find that benefit amount limits per family and the prioritisation of women as benefit recipients reward female caretakers while not considering fathers and penalise large families.

Paper long abstract:

This chapter explores how conditional cash transfers (CCTs) can be used to normalise certain types of idealised familial roles and how they may reproduce familial norms. Based the programme designs of CCTs and their expansions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean, this chapter analyses which norms and assumptions regarding families are behind design features and conditions of CCTs. Furthermore, legislative texts and statements by policy makers that justify family-based restrictions in Argentina and Brazil undergo a discourse analysis to identify the family norms that justify these restrictions embedded in programme design. Based on these analyses, we find that conditionalities are not the main components of CCTs used to reproduce familial norms. Rather, benefit amount limits per family and the prioritisation of women as benefit recipients tend to do this in the Region. These features tend to reward female caretakers while not considering fathers and penalise large families. The Argentinian and Brazilian cases show how discourses that reproduce ideas about families influence the policy process in different ways as they constructed deserving and undeserving families and family members. In Argentina, stereotypes about supposedly dysfunctional poor families and malevolent mothers became part of the AUH’s design through a lack of resistance. During the pandemic in Brazil, gendered family roles were questioned, but nonetheless reproduced during the urgent creation of the Auxílio Emergencial by protecting mothers from supposedly aggressive and fraudulent male ex-partners.