Paper short abstract:

This paper compares and contrasts grassroots responses to cash transfer schemes in Zambia and South Africa, addressing questions of perceived deservingness, the value of care work and the influence of citizen perceptions on social protection policy design.

Paper long abstract:

How do the poor and long-term unemployed conceptualise categories of those who do (and do not) deserve to receive cash transfers? This paper builds on original qualitative data from Zambia and South Africa to tease out overlaps and variations in local views of deservingness and just (re)distribution via cash transfers. The paper explores three dimensions of citizen views of cash transfer programmes. First, even in contexts of high economic insecurity, our interlocutors insisted that those who are deserving of cash transfers are those who are physically unable to work. This finding holds across both contexts, delimiting prospects for a new politics of distribution (Ferguson, 2015). Secondly, while in both places care is rarely framed as work (and thus rarely understood to deserve economic support), views of grants aimed at children or dependents and their carers varied across the contexts. Our South African interlocutors view the Child Support Grant as an important caveat to their insistence that ‘one cannot get money for nothing’. However, in Zambia respondents raised complaints about able-bodied adults with dependents – particularly women with children – receiving government assistance. These cases raise questions about the perceived value of care work – crucial to a gender-sensitive analysis of social protection (Plagerson et al., 2017). Third, the paper explores how grassroots perceptions can directly or indirectly shape policy design, investigating ways in which the South African and Zambian states have hesitated to implement universal cash transfer policies in favour of targeting those popularly understood to be ‘deserving’ of assistance.