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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the work and perspectives of volunteers in the daily implementation of a cash transfer programme in the Colombian Putumayo. It focuses on their role as organisers of programme meetings. It argues that, by performing this role, they engage in logistical and political brokerage.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the work and perspectives of volunteers who were critical to implement Familias en Acción (Families in Action), Colombia's primary conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme, in the town of Mocoa in the Colombian Putumayo. These volunteers were female leaders of CCT recipients known as 'madres líderes' (leader mothers). Leaders were simultaneously active or former CCT recipients and unpaid frontline workers of this state programme for poverty reduction. Based on ethnographic research conducted over one year in Mocoa from 2022 to 2023, the paper focuses on the role of leaders as organisers of 'encuentros' (encounters), namely periodic meetings between recipients and local government officials. It argues that, by organising encounters, leaders engaged in forms of logistical and political brokerage. Through the logistics of bringing together various actors, infrastructures, and activities needed for these events, they aimed at fostering emotional bonds and personalising relationships with groups of recipients. This relational work also had a political aspect. Leaders faced difficulties in gaining recognition, compensation, and financial support for their voluntary labour. To address their precarious positions, they enabled and navigated the interaction between the programme and electoral politics—prohibited by the national government. By doing so, they secured desired resources to include in encounters, received gestures of compensation for their labour, and accessed spaces to build relationships with potential powerholders within the town government—creating bonds they expected to rely on to cope with their lack of recognition in the programme. Both types of brokerage constituted leaders' lived experience of grassroots policy implementation.