Social Policy Instruments in Motion. Conditional Cash Transfers from Mexico to Peru

Social policy prescriptions for Latin America have shifted significantly over recent decades. This article tracks a process by which a conditional cash transfer (CCT) to mothers, begun in a Mexican programme with some pretensions to promoting gender equality, was standardized by international organizations, becoming a policy instrument characterized by gender sensitivity, but having little attention to equality. In addition to involving certification by international organizations, this standardization process framed the CCT as an instrument of social investment and was a decontextualization of the Mexican version that had been influenced by Beijing-style international feminism. The third phase of this trajectory was take-up of the standard model by Peruvian policymakers and employees of the Juntos programme who overlaid their long-standing representations of their indigenous clientele onto a supposedly modern' social policy instrument, thereby rendering it both maternalist and neo-colonial.