Cash Transfers in Context: An Anthropological Perspective, Hardcover

Marginal in status a decade ago, cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low-and middle-income countries. While these programs have had positive effects, they are typical of top-down development interventions in that they impose on local contexts standardized norms and procedures regarding conditionality, targeting, and delivery. This book sheds light on the crucial importance of these contexts and the many unpredicted consequences of cash transfer programs worldwide - detailing how the latter are used by actors to pursue their own strategies, and how external norms are reinterpreted, circumvented, and contested by local populations.

Emmanuelle Piccoli is an Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She is an anthropologist, and has been carrying out research in the Peruvian Andes since 2005. Her publications include Les Rondes paysannes: Vigilance, politique et justice dans les Andes péruviennes (Academia, 2011) as well as numerous papers.