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- Convenors:
-
Shruti Iyer
(University of Oxford)
Meredith McLaughlin (University of Cambridge)
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- Chair:
-
Meredith McLaughlin
(University of Cambridge)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Stream:
- Embedding justice in development
- Location:
- B401
- Sessions:
- Thursday 27 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This roundtable will facilitate a reflective conversation on the moral imaginaries framing cash transfer programmes. It asks what meanings people attach to social protection, how this influences claims, and critically interrogates the relationship between redistribution and social justice.
Long Abstract:
Cash transfers have recently come to be at the forefront of poverty alleviation initiatives globally. These programmes typify new trends in redistributive politics (Ferguson 2015) and have expanded especially rapidly in contexts defined by precarious labour conditions, where social assistance efforts have often been implemented under a framework of ‘development’ (Kar 2017: 12). These cash transfer programmes intervene into dynamic social worlds and state-society relations, raising questions about relationality, reciprocity, dependency, trust, care, and the norms of a just society (Neumark 2020; Schmidt 2022). In this roundtable session, we ask how varied case studies can help us understand the moral imaginaries that emerge around cash transfer programmes. For instance, what meanings are attached to cash transfers as they circulate within communities of beneficiaries? How do transfers mediate relationships between people and with the state? To what extent do the state and other actors (e.g. NGOs) frame these interventions in the idioms of ‘self-reliance’, ‘empowerment’, 'relief', or ‘development,’ and what are their attendant moral assumptions? Do beneficiaries regard transfers as rights, entitlements, shares, or gifts? How are ethical visions for cash transfers articulated, and how do they inform people’s claims? By focusing on the moral aspirations and concerns that surround cash transfers, this roundtable critically interrogates how they relate to the broader objectives of social justice. We will consider how cash transfers feature within the wider politics of redistribution and attempts to expand social and economic rights.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Thursday 27 June, 2024, -Sruthi Herbert (University of Edinburgh)
Contribution short abstract:
I discuss the narratives of fraud around the BOCW funds in India that administrative officials and labour union activists highlight. Juxtaposing this with the adminstrative unaccountability of these funds is an opportunity to examine the moral imaginaries around welfare in India.
Contribution long abstract:
In this roundtable, I will discuss the dominance of the narrative of fraudulent beneficiaries that ignores the administrative/fiscal non-accountability around social welfare funds i India. In doing so, I touch upon the significant overlaps between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ and the moral imaginary around welfare and its beneficiaries.
Funds running into billions of Indian rupees lie unspent with special-purpose social welfare boards such as the Building and Other Construction Workers (BOCW) welfare board in India. These boards, constituted specifically to address the vulnerabilities of these workers, collect funds through a cess. Cesses are different from general taxation in that these funds are earmarked for specific purposes. In their quarter-century of existence the underspending by these welfare boards have largely escaped public scrutiny and unaccountability.
Right after the COVID-19-induced lockdown in India in March 2020, the central government instructed the states to mobilise the BOCW funds for pandemic relief. The states provided ex-gratia (or discretionary one-term) benefits for registered (and often, unregistered) construction workers and their families. Even as digitisation is championed as a way to weed out corruption, administrators and trade union activists point to ‘fraudulent’ registration and claims aimed at securing the cash transfers.
I juxtapose the unaccountability around under-spending and concern around fraud. A closer look at these invariably necessitate an introspection into the principles and practice of citizenship rights and guarantees.
Alesha Porisky (Northern Illinois University)
Contribution short abstract:
Cash transfers have the potential to alter citizen-state relations by providing recipients with new avenues to access the state and its resources. In doing so, they can challenge dominant narratives about the state's roles and responsibilities in the everyday lives of marginalized citizens.
Contribution long abstract:
Cash transfers have the potential to alter citizen-state relations by providing citizens with new avenues to access the state and its resources, which can in turn expand their access to the formal structures of the state. Moreover, the implementation of cash transfers can challenge dominant narratives about the state's roles and responsibilities in the everyday lives of marginalized citizens. While cash transfers are mostly likely to have transformative impacts on citizens-state relations in contexts where citizens have been previously marginalized by the state, the transformative impacts of cash transfers are mediated both by the design of programs and citizens' prior understandings and experiences with the state. These factors shape the norms of reciprocity built into the everyday practices of program implementation, shape citizens' interpretations of inclusion and exclusion, and determine whether recipients view cash transfers as a right, entitlement, or gift.
These reflections draw on research conducted for my book project that examines the impacts of cash transfers on recipients' perceptions and practices of citizenship in Kenya and Tanzania, research on subnational variations in the implementation of cash transfers in Kenya, and a new project on how cash transfers facilitate citizens' access to the state in Northern Uganda.
Kate Pruce (Institute of Development Studies)
Contribution short abstract:
I would like to explore the role of perceptions and narratives in shaping understandings of rights, as well as how status and contributions to society can determine access to cash transfers/state assistance in different ways depending on how these contributions are valued and recognised (or not).
Contribution long abstract:
- Cash transfers can be rights-determining rather than rights-based, especially where policies are not enshrined in legislation. They can be subject to sometimes rapid and frequent changes in design and targeting (e.g. short-lived pilot schemes), with material consequences for recipients. For example, in Zambia beneficiaries were removed from the cash transfer scheme when eligibility criteria changed.
- While the link between rights and duties/responsibilities has been recognised and explored in conceptual work on social protection and rights (e.g. Ulriksen and Plagerson, 2014), it is often not considered in studies of specific programmes – particularly how perceptions/expectations of responsibilities (among policymakers and within communities) can shape the design and acceptability of cash transfer schemes e.g. undervaluing of care work.
- Rights and duties can have temporal and sometimes generational elements. For example contributions in the past, such as by elderly people who can no longer work, are widely accepted as a basis for receiving state assistance. Veterans who fought in Timor-Leste’s independence struggle in the past are perceived to have “special and different rights”. Their rights are prioritised and they receive much higher government transfer amounts than other groups in society suggesting that redistribution is shaped by maintaining peace and stability rather than poverty, despite high malnutrition and stunting in Timor-Leste. On the other hand, cash transfers linked to present/future contributions such as investments in the nutrition and education of children are more likely to be questioned, with suspicions that the money will be spent on the ‘wrong things’.
Muthanna Saari (University of Sussex)
Contribution short abstract:
This research critically assesses how zakat practice locates itself within the broader UK state welfare system. It examines recipients' attitudes from the perspectives of piety and rights and the motivations of charity organisations and Islamic institutions on this wealth redistribution.
Contribution long abstract:
According to the tenets of Sunni Islam, zakat is an obligation ordained by God unto Muslims not merely as an act of personal piety but as a means to produce and sustain a moral community based on an ethic of (socioeconomic) justice. Indeed, Qur’anic traditions underscore that the prescriptive wealth redistribution engendered by giving zakat would work to contain economic inequality and social disparity and strengthen (civil and political) society. Furthermore, zakat-giving has been presented not simply as a religious duty but as a right of those who receive it. In other words, zakat is not an act of charity or philanthropy, but it is the restitution of an amount of wealth that givers had kept in trust on behalf of the rightful recipient. Most studies tend to focus on the givers’ perspective of their motivation and intention in giving zakat, this research, on the other hand, focuses on the perspective of zakat recipients, despite having been missing or somewhat neglected, have a unique position in this wealth redistribution relationship. Therefore, this research examines zakat recipients’ thoughts on receiving zakat and how they perceive the money (or other types of assistance) given to them. The research analyses the relationship between piety and the human agency of zakat recipients in the context of how religiosity plays a role in influencing the people’s agency that would shape the existence of transformative aspects in the practice of zakat for social mobility.