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Adolescents, Crisis and Risk.
Are CCTs an adequate policy answer?
Paper prepared for
UNICEF – ODI Conference
'The impact of the global food, fuel, and financial crises and policy responses:
A child-sensitive approach'.
Alberto Minujin1 and Valeria Llobet2
Summary
In the context of the present economic crisis, the paper address two main questions, in regard to
CCTs’ directed towards adolescents in Argentina, Brazil and New York City. The first is related
to the rationale of CCTs, focused in the promotion of human capital, and the context, or
development model, in which this rationale is developed, and the tools through it is supposed to
be implemented. The second one is related to the question if these programs promote social
inclusion through full and substantive citizenship and if they could be useful tools to alleviate the
negative impact of the crisis.
Based upon ethnographic, official and secondary data, the paper outlines and discusses core
aspects of the three CCTs selected, Opportunity NYC, ProJovem Adolescente and Proyecto
Adolescente: conditionalities, transfers, adolescents’ participation, transparency and
accountability. It also considers how adolescents frame social risk and vulnerability in everyday
life and how much these aspects are consider by the programs.
The programs share the interesting point of framing adolescents not as a mere extension of
children, but as different subjects. Nevertheless, seems not to be grasping the complexity of
adolescents’ lives and social problems, particularly in regards of quality of education and
training available for them. This is probably explained by the tensions that moral and
psychological approach to adolescents’ exclusion, the monetary approach to poverty, and the
dependency of the programs’ goals to social control aspirations, bring into the definition of
strategies. Since that, the programs hardly will promote full social inclusion and substantive
citizenship, if some crucial aspects are not redefined, as participation, accountability,
transparency
and
conditionalities.
1
2
Research Fellow and Faculty, Graduate Program of International Affairs, The New School
Researcher, National Council of Scientific Research (CONICET), Professor, National University of San Martín
1. Introduction
The situation of children and adolescents improved within Latin America, after the “lost decade”
of the eighties and the neoliberal tone of the nineties, however, children and adolescents continue
to suffer from poverty, deprivation, inequity and discrimination at disturbing levels. The current
economic crisis adds an additional serious factor to the adversity that poverty in general implies
for them. The crisis is expected to affect children and adolescents directly, through less quantity
and quality of food, resources available to their families, and opportunities for independence and
autonomy. It may also affect indirectly through impacting funding of basic social services,
reduction of job opportunities for their parents, and increasing the stress of raising children in a
crisis context. Conceição et al. (2009, p. 5) note that “less skilled and poorer workers are often
more likely to be laid off at the beginning of an economic downturn. Lack of education and
transferable skills implies that the group is likely to be the last to get employed after the economy
bounces back.” Formal sector job losses also increase the informalization of labor. Nonetheless,
many adolescents are already out of the educational system and confronting serious difficulties
to enter the labor market.
Crisis in Latin America may grow poverty, but inequality of income certainly increases after
crisis. After 2001, crisis, poverty rates doubled in Argentina, but inequality between quintiles of
income increased geometrically. According to Galbraith (2007) those processes are
microeconomic (that is, centered in consumption and labor market) but also macroeconomic.
Horizontal inequality increases as well: people in the same quintile of income could become poor
since their jobs are in a particular economic branch or their capacities are out-of-date.
Still, it is worth noting that the experience of those risk factors may vary showing specific
articulations from a meso-social point of view. Adolescents, boys and girls, are in a transitional
moment of their life cycle. Many of them, especially among the poor sectors, are entering into
their productive and/ or reproductive life. Traditionally, policies hold life-cycle transitions
drawing upon ideas of adulthood as a point of arrival. But there is the need to consider also the
inherent importance of adolescence as a moment and a complex set of experiences that, for
instance, start full sexual life and autonomous social group inclusion. Teenagers intend to
negotiate risk with their parents, in order to accomplish degrees of autonomy. Both processes can
trace future life trajectories, closing off some opportunities and determining some paths.
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) is one of the policy strategies that have been adopted in most
of the countries in Latin America to reduce poverty. Since adolescence is viewed largely as
problematic, some specific responses to the public’s concerns are emerging. First Brazil and then
Argentina fashioned and are implementing CCTs for adolescents with no direct intermediation
by theirs families or parents. New York City, following the experience of Mexico’s Progresa Oportunidades, is testing a CCT program that, while targeting families, delivers some of the
monetary incentives directly to adolescents.3 Without pretending to approach the problem in the
perspective of a methodology of international comparative studies, we will analyze the ways in
which problems are defined and addressed.
There is a difference between these programs and traditional scholarships, since the
former are run by social and human services areas, not by secretaries or ministries of
education.
3
It is in this context of crisis on one side and CCTs as an alternative for expanding social
protection to vulnerable groups that the main questions in this paper will be discussed. They are
as follows:
a) If young people are among the groups highly impacted by the increase of unemployment and
labor crisis, how are CCTs focusing on them, formulating the relations between human capital,
development models and individual strategies?
b) Are CCTs focusing on adolescents and youths “transformatives” in the sense of enlarging
their citizenship, promoting and ensuring their rights and /or fully promoting inclusion of new
generations?
More specifically we will address the following complementary questions:
Are CCTs useful tools for promoting rights and citizenship among adolescents? Can CCTs help
adolescents to overcome the difficult situations that they are facing in Latin America?
The paper starts with a discussion on the impact of the crisis on young people in Latin America
and the situation of exclusion, risk and adversity that many of them have been facing that have
been aggravated by the crisis. This first point will support the conceptual framework adopted in
this paper under the umbrella of the human rights based-approach.
The second part of the paper will address the issue of the expansion of CCTs in LA and analyze
how much they are oriented to young people. The third section will discuss the experience of the
aforementioned three CCTs targeted to adolescents: “Proyecto Adolescente” in the Argentinean
province of Buenos Aires, “ProJovem” in Brazil, and “Opportunity NYC” in New York City,
USA. The analysis will include ethnographic research conducted with adolescent clients of
Proyecto Adolescente and assistants to Centros de Actividades Juveniles (CAJ). The next part
debates some central issues related to adolescents in terms of participation, conditionality,
accountability presented by these programs.
The final point raises some comments and questions based in the analysis of the evidences
presented in the previous points focus on how much these programs are promoting rights
entitlements and citizenship, and could help to overcome the effect of the crisis on adolescents
and young people.
2. Adolescents facing crisis: poverty, exclusion and adversity
Latin America is facing two processes that literature tends to view as related. First of all,
inequality, as we already said, is growing and even more so after the crisis. The poorest 20% of
households shares between 2.2% and 8.8% of total income, while the richest 20% of households
captures between 41.8% and 62.4% (UNICEF, 2005). Second of all, the last twenty years are
showing an increase in homicide rates, a tendency that puts Latin America at a criminality level
higher than that of any other region in the world (Frances Stewart, 2008).
Social vulnerability expresses the inability of the poorest to cope with the stress and effects of
crisis. Poverty is commonly identified with social vulnerability, nonetheless the insecurity and
defenselessness felt by people living in poverty is not explained by insufficiency of income
(Pizarro, 2001).
Therefore, how the crisis would affect young people in Latin America needs a type of answer
that considers subtle processes articulated to global tendencies. There is general agreement that
unemployment is growing due to the impact of financial crises, but it is not affecting the national
economy homogeneously.
In the Argentinean context, the most affected areas are construction, textile industries and
services, followed by automobile industries and tourism (Ministry of Labor, 2009). The first
three are likely to employ the less qualified workers. Within those, construction is likely to
employ men and youth, whilst the textile industry and services are more likely to employ
women. Apart from that, the main impact is received by small and medium companies, those that
are more likely to include the less qualified workers and those that are most important in terms of
number of work positions (Ministry of Labor, 2009). These trends tend to show a double impact:
first, the youngest and less qualified workers may lose their jobs, and they are probably not
covered by unemployment security due to the kind of informality in the market. Secondly, the
stability and high salaries at the other end of the spectrum are not heavily affected by inflation
and unemployment, so the inequality will continue to grow.
Unlike Argentina, Brazil has shown some modest reduction of inequality the past five years
(Poverty Centre OnePager Nro 89, 2009), partially related to the combination of CCT’s impact
and the previous situation.4 In this context, vulnerable youths have started to experience some
inclusion in school, labor market and consumption that could be lost as a result of the crisis.
In both countries –and also within population living in poverty in New York- teenage pregnancy
tends to grow within social and economical crisis contexts, and the increased demand on the
public health sector will have an impact in the quality and extension of health coverage.
But it is necessary to say, the Latin American context, as well as New York, shows a very high
percentage of youths and teenagers that were already out of school and out of work: 1 out of each
four Latin American and New Yorker teenagers were institutionally excluded –even before
September 2008. These are the ones supposedly targeted by the programs here analyzed.
Therefore, how are they going to be affected? Is the crisis modifying somehow the patterns of
concentration and appropriation of resources and opportunities that underlies inequality and
leads to exclusion? Is the crisis impacting negatively how adolescents are portrayed in media, as
the tendencies of last ten years appears to show? (Red Andi, 2009).
2.1 Adolescents in social agenda
Even with the current prominence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in
framing children’s policies in Latin America, in May 2007, the UNICEF statement in the IX
Iberoamerican Summit of Children and Adolescents Ministries drew attention to the necessity of
focusing on children and adolescents while designing policies on social cohesion. Though not
openly stated, the general increase of violence and crime rates, the visibility of those committed
by teenagers and youths, and it supposed relation to drug trafficking, are major concerns
underlying this agenda.
4
Brazil shows, for instance, a high repetition rate even in primary school (over 63% of primary school pupils are older than the
appropriate age group for that grade) unevenly distributed throughout the country (the north and northeast regions have higher rates
than the national average 77.6% and 80%, respectively). In terms of the extension of enrollment, a data that could help us picture
the rates reached in secondary education, only 10% of total enrollment is placed in high school (http://www.ibe.unesco.org/es/en-elmundo/america-latina-y-el-caribe/brasil/profile-of-education.html, accessed 2/20/2009)
Social agendas throughout Latin America (as well as in most of the world) are being overlapped
by a vision of youth and adolescence as a danger to social cohesion, and the crisis context will
probably give rise to an even more concerned agenda. Adolescence and youth are not merely
demographic categories but symbolic and relational ones. They are mirroring adults’ worries and
concerns.
There are different visions of adolescence and youth held by adults that are splitting the
demographic category in moral terms, as well as with children, between minors and normal
children. Many of these representations, however, show very narrow spectrum of concerns:
drugs consumption, antisocial behavior, offender and criminal acts, and pregnancy. Childhood is
viewed in relationship to innocence, the future, rights and the need for care and protection, while
youth is viewed both, as future and vital power if “included”, dangerous, hazardous, and an
evidence of the decay of values if “excluded”. Therefore, exclusion is proposed as the key term
to name the problem, and in a broad sense it refers to the disconnection from consumption and
being out of the labor market. There are also voices that call for attention to the diverse
manifestations of child and adolescent participation. From the international agencies and
governments, there is a recalling of the importance of new generations for economic and social
development.
But since this is the context of “policy-making” processes, we will pay attention to two aspects.
First, the split representation between children and youth overshadows those that are too old to
be treated as children and too young to be sent to work as adults. Adolescence remains a
contested category to frame the population between 14 and 18, due to its negative shadow to
experience, but the necessity to face the dynamic nature of children’s identities and needs
remains clear. The association between youth and crime and between children and rights masks
the challenging nature that adolescence places on social programs. The same child will be a peril
or a right-holder depending upon the point of view of different programs.
Secondly, even if focusing on exclusion we should be moving to a social arena of understanding
the problems, and the programs should be considering how they match the causes of exclusion,
we will hold the hypothesis that programs are more concerned about crime and social disorder,
than by how to help adolescents to be fully and autonomous part of society, a full citizen.
2.2 How to analyze social policy through adolescents’ citizenship lenses
From a citizenship perspective, participation, accountability, and a close examination of
conditionalities, targeting and funding, should be considered axes dimensions of analysis of
CCTs. Advancing in the analysis from a rights perspective, the extension of equality and the
conception of citizenship in CCTs are problematics. The iconization of children and adolescents
as investments and human capital themselves implies an understanding of children as
“becomings” and not children as beings (Fawcett, 2004 in Lister, 2006): “the current emphasis
on children’s life chances need to be rooted in an equal concern with children’s well-being and
flourishing as children” (Lister, 2006: 330).
Dobrowlsky with Lister (2004) calls for attention to the idea that the reframing of citizenship’s
meanings is shifting towards an instrumentalization of citizenship. Citizenship becomes just a
means for social insertion. Since that is the emphasis, responsibilities and obligations are
promoted over rights, the broader notions of citizenship succumb to over-arching economic
objectives, and increasingly narrow notions of citizenship become interlaced with moral
undertones that regulate the parents and mothers behaviors and that eclipse their welfare and
rights behind the children’s future welfare (Lister: 2006). What does this imply practically when
considering that the CCT model is actively extended to adolescents?
Furthermore, inequality in the present is eluded throughout a particular reframing process: “[the
social investment state]5 focus on the needs of specific groups of children, but underplay
structural economic and social class determinants, thereby reframing the matter as one of
personal responsibility in the quest to equip oneself to take advantage of ‘life’s chances’”
(Hendrick, 2005: 56). The personal shift sustaining the new social policy agenda seems to be a
case in the politization and de-politization struggle (Fraser, 1991).
Nonetheless, a social justice agenda for children and adolescents involves both the public and
private domains, and needs to seek for both redistribution and recognition (Fraser). The
combination of different trends of injustice, as stated by Fraser as economic as well as cultural
(she also added a third domain later, the political and institutional realm) reminds us to treat very
carefully what is called and understood as “exclusion”. Social exclusion and poverty being major
problems in the social agenda concerning children and adolescents, they deserve special
attention. Levitas (2005) has already shown how in different settings and with different
backgrounds there are several divergences in the way that social policy could understand the
causes and outcomes of social exclusion. As she observes, there are at least three models of
understanding them. Social inclusion, on the other hand, could be understood, or not, in terms of
full and meaningful citizenship. Most of the critics argue that the CCTs concealed policies are
related to this narrow understanding both of citizenship and of the relation between exclusionary
dynamics, poverty and inequality. How could adolescents’ and youths’ citizenship be interpreted,
what is understand as exclusion, and in a broad sense, how do we understand their representation
and social identity as well as needs are probable main topics of and overshadow disagreement.
This point, the interpretation of adolescents’ and youths’ citizenship, is crucial in a crisis’
context. The framing of the problem to be solved will focus on some paths and obscure others. If
we do not interpret the crisis and its impacts as problems of social justice, we will hardly address
them in the direction of preserving social rights.
3. CCTs and Youth
The general structure of most of CCTs programs is straightforward: CCTs deliver monetary
incentives to poor families if they perform some conditionalities (i.e., tasks that are required for
receiving funds), such as their children attending schools and undertaking appropriate
preventative health care. These conditionalities, or behaviors, represent different targets and are
viewed as investments in human capital. In theory, by virtue of accomplishing these actions,
families are being helped to break the intergenerational poverty circle, both by the government
through monetary incentives or rewards, and by their own actions.
“Social Investment State” is the way British literature started calling the third way
approach to social policy, in particular Esping-Anderson proposal for social policy
reform and investment on child’s welfare (Esping Andersen, 2002).
5
The assumptions underlying the CCTs programs are that poor households are unable to “invest”
in the areas that have been proven to be the best means for overcoming poverty at the level of
individuals and families, such as education and health care. Also, there is an agreement of a
necessary partnership between the state and those that are receiving the social assistance. This is
accompanied by an understanding of social assistance as a means of dealing with increased and
variable risk and uncertainties, particularly derived from a globalized economy. CCTs’ ability to
deal with it is related to their focusing on enhancing poor people’s capacities to avoid, cope with
and/or recover form adverse shocks (Shepherd et. Al, 2004, Jones, Vargas and Villar, 2007).
Of course, this obscured the other side of the coin, the structural and systemic determinations of
poverty and inequality.6 Poverty and inequality being a dynamic and multidimensional problem,
the transference of money to deal with day to day stress and as a means of not having to take the
children out of school or not to be able to take care of health is not a ready-made answer, as good
as it sounds. The hypothesis that education and health could work the same way in any socioeconomical context remains unproved, and is overshadowed by the future-oriented, child
centered rationality.
The underlying conception of risk hold by CCTs derives from conceptions of global society and
its inherent uncertainty, as developed by Giddens and Beck, among others. In this light, the main
risk from what to protect people is not to develop human capital that brings, into a knowledgeera, the flexibility needed to cope with flows and changes. Therefore, for undeveloped countries
to help poor households to invest in their human capital should be enough. The households
targeted will be those in poverty according to different proxy-measures, or those that proof that
are poor.
Even if we assume that this diagnosis is somehow correct, the question of how this frame
“translates” into adolescence remains unanswered.
What is risk and crisis during adolescence?
There is a general agreement that growing up in extreme poverty may have long-life
consequences. Boyden proposes that adversity should be understood in terms of circumstances
and processes that undermine household functioning and represent a risk to children’s wellbeing
and development (2009). There is also agreement in highlight that risk and vulnerability are
perceived and lived in many different ways, varying from cultural values, social contexts, and
personal history. Life-cycle transitions draw upon ideas of adulthood as a point of arrival, but
there is the need of consider also the inherent importance of adolescence as a moment and a
complex set of experiences that, for instance, start full sexual life and autonomous social groups
inclusion. Both processes are important and can trace future life trajectories, closing some
opportunities and determining some paths.
Nonetheless, this perspective seems far from CCTs mainstream approach that, while focusing in
the two main processes affecting human capital, does not necessarily includes other than
monetary conceptions of it. Differences between children’s needs, adolescent’s needs and adults’
needs are not considered (Vandemoortele, 2000; Minujin, 2005).
According to Thomas Pogge, “High inequality tends to bias the range of publicly available information about the poverty
problem, the range of publicly available explanations of its persistence, and the range of reform proposals offered to address it.
These distortions impede effective poverty eradication.” (Pogge, 2007:145)
6
The unequal distribution of poverty and deprivation within the household affects specially
women, children and teenagers (Feeny and Boyden, 2003). But is poorly considered by
approaches that assume materialistic perspectives for to deliver the transfers and to improve the
household’s human capital.
Finally, interrelation between human development, freedom and welfare is not included, nor its
dependency of other goods that are not merchantilized. Other forms of risk and hardship are
overlapped by economic ones, and the mere fact that adolescents are neither children nor youths
is obscured by the general economic approach.
In the ethnographic research conducted with adolescent clients of Proyecto Adolescente and
assistants to Centros de Actividades Juveniles (CAJ) during 2008, we concentrate in knowing
how they understand risk, citizenship and inclusion in everyday life. Adolescents’ interviewed
tend to localize risk. Public spaces, the paths that connect the home and the city, the spaces
where to socialize in the neighborhoods, are the places that adolescents tend to name as
dangerous and at risk. This evaluation modifies everyday life through different paths: teenagers
avoid leaving or coming back home at certain hours, they avoid sport clubs or health centers, or
schools gained bad reputation because of its emplacement. This consideration of what is viewed
and where risk is placed during adolescence, since autonomy and mobility are crucial in a rich
experience of youth, is an important one. Networks and cultural experiences also rely on those
aspects.
When considering risk as related to space and territory, we are challenging the usual
understanding of risk in social policy, which is usually related to personal and even
psychological characteristics. For people living in poverty, social interactions, networking and
eventually social capital may be more affected by environment and spatial disposition of actors
than other forms of permanent affiliations. Let us consider a few examples. One form of
networking derives from family relationships, in many different conceptions of family
(biological, social, affective, etc.). First jobs are usually highly dependent on family social
capital. For people with high restrictions of money, transportation cost may affect the intensity
and frequency of interactions with those members of family that live far from their homes. This
seems to be the case of many adolescents interviewed. Those that were viewed as the most
important members of the family tend to live far from the poor neighborhoods were they live.
Therefore, interactions with them are fewer than necessary to be able to count on them. The
amount of money transferred by programs it is far from enough to help members of households
to commute from their neighborhoods.
There are studies showing the urban transformations occur due to the global house market. The
segmentation of cities derives in less and less contact between different social classes, and adds
effect of accumulation of disadvantages within the territory (Saravi, 2006; Arriagada Leuco,
2009). This has impact in social and cultural strategies; traduced in friendship, love relations,
autonomous chose of leisure. From the perspective of life trajectories, restricted opportunities to
enrich social relationships and experiences imply fewer opportunities to build plasticity and to
develop social and psychological strengths. A sense of lack of ability to perform well in school
and an accumulation of experiences of failure are at hand for them to explain why they
themselves abandon high school. Meritocratic ideology to understand society, hold by schools
and also –at least partially- by CCTs, may distort the entrances to labor market –through social
networks. Are the CCTs grasping these problems from actors’ perspectives?
The crisis, in the other hand, it is unevenly distributed through the territory. We can imagine that
cities as Buenos Aires or San Pablo would experience some processes that the favelas or villas
miserias surrounding it would suffer differently. Each city develops its own profile in its
insertion to economy and financial world. This sort of data is necessary in order to better
understand how is impacting locally the global crisis. It is necessary, for instance, to know better
what kinds of jobs are being destroyed: are they those that the poorest and less qualified access?
Are generally the less qualified or just some of them? For instance, young women working as
house helper for people renting their apartments for foreigners, are loosing their jobs as well as
young women working as house helper in a local family’ house owning a commerce, or working
for a financial company?
Risk therefore is unevenly distributed through territory, and youths, teenagers and children build
their views on inclusion through their social spaces. Social space is built in relationship with
identities, categories and other forms of affiliation. Why, then, when considering children the
problem is poverty, but when considering their older brothers or sisters (but mostly brothers) the
problem turns into exclusion or disconnectedness?7 With no intention to answer these questions,
it is also necessary to ask how do the CCTs programs manage the changing nature of childhood,
since the coverage of transferences tend to extend until the children are 18 years old. How do
evaluations manage the fact that, opposite to youngest children, secondary school attendance still
shows an important percentage of droops-outs and inequality between households related to
income?
4. The cases of Opportunity NYC; ProJovem Adolescente and Proyecto
Adolescente
In this section, we will introduce the programs’ most salient characteristics and its institutional
and socio-political context. The context of Opportunity NYC, following Fraser and Gordon, is
one in which social citizenship was never developed. In the case of Brazil and Argentina, there is
a tradition of fragmented universalism in the extension of social citizenship, according to Fleury
(1997), but in the case of children and adolescents there is an extended culture of rights
permeating social policies and institutions. But as Dagningo (2008) argues, a neoliberal
conception of citizenship, carried-out by new social programs, particularly those targeted and
focalized as CCTs, “abandons the very idea of rights, particularly social rights”. In the case of
Argentina, Hintze (2007) among others has stated that social inclusion implied an overlapping
between citizenship and status as worker.
4.1 Opportunity New York City is a set of three Conditional Cash Transfers programs that are
being tested under the coordination of CEO.8 Was developed mirroring the non-developed
One could say the answer is quite clear, in relation with the different nature of age
as we pointed before. But since we are high lightening the moment of introducing in
the agenda an area and therefore constructing a problem, the answer is not a readymade one.
8 The three branches: Opportunity NYC Family Rewards, the most comprehensive of the three and the one that is
being implemented within a vaster population (2,550 families, with a similar number as control group). ONYC Work
Rewards, implemented only within populations living in subsidized housing, targeting 1,700 households. Thirdly,
ONYC Spark is operated by the Department of Education in junction with Harvard’s American Inequality Lab, and is
targeting 59 selected schools in poor neighborhoods, and reaching nearly 8,600 students (CEO, 2008).
7
countries experiences, particularly the Mexican case “Oportunidades”.9 The program is
structured to direct the families’ investment in activities defined as those necessary to achieve
stable economic success by developing human capital and, as a consequence, breaking the cycle
of poverty. The design also aims to promote new family dynamics by rewarding training and
work for both parents while helping to probably get childcare by different means, including citywide public provided day-care.10 Opportunity is conceived as “a two generation initiative to
reduce poverty, and it includes both shorter-term and longer-term poverty reduction goals”
(MDRC, 2008). The program includes no new social services or case management, as the
provision of social protection used to be in the United States.
The neighborhoods selected for the pilot implementation are among NYC’s most persistently
poor: about 40% of households in these districts have incomes under the Federal poverty line
(New York City Department of City Planning, Census 2000). The complex targeting process
implied that the Department of Education provided a list of families with children in the fourth,
seventh or ninth grades receiving free meals at school, as a proxy-means for low income, and
then community-based organizations have to find the families and ask for the participation. The
process last almost the first year of implementation in some neighborhoods, but was intended to
reach the most isolated families, not just those that have enough social resources to find out what
is available for them (CEO agent, personal communication, February 2009). In order to
participate in ONYC: Family Rewards families in the eligible districts have to have income equal
or less than 130% of the Federal poverty line (an annual income of less than $22,321 for a family
of three), with at least one child in the fourth, seventh or ninth grade attending a New York City
public school, and at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. Since in
the composition of the poor population in the city, immigrants and non-citizens are a majority,
this restriction probably has enormous implications.
Table 1: Opportunity NYC
Program



Family
Rewards
Work
Rewards
Spark
9
Design
Leadership of CEO
Design and evaluation of MDRC
Implementation by Seedco (coord)
and Union Settlements, Citizens
Advice Bureau, Catholic Charities,
Groundwork, Urban Health Plan,
Brownsville Community Development
Corporation


Leadership of CEO
Implementation by New York City’s
Housing
Preservation
and
Development, and New York Housing
Authority

Leadership
by
Department
of
Education
Implementation,
design
and
evaluation by The Educational

Structure and Goals
The most comprehensive offers monetary
incentives to families living in poverty and a
two generation strategy to reduce current and
long-term poverty

children’s educational achievement,

health care,

workforce participation and job training
activities.
Strategy to reduce current and long term
poverty by tying incentives to adult’s work
outcomes using subsidized housing as a
platform. Test an enriched version of Federal
Family Self Sufficiency program and CCT to
Section 8 holders.
Provides small monetary incentives to fourthand seventh grade public school students for
achievement
in
periodic
assessments
throughout the academic year
Not explicitly mentioned, the British experience of the Education Maintenance Allowance that funds the continuity of
education after compulsory period for eligible adolescents (depending on family income) may be rooting some
aspects. Nevertheless, as far as we know it doesn’t explicitly share the conditionality of the model.
10 As CEO states, these differences with mainstream CCTs is based both in the ideological and institutional context in
which ONYC is being developed: “Adapting the CCT model to include a robust employment and training component
was a natural choice for New York. Supporting work participation is the major thrust of recent American social policy”
(ONYC: CCT, 22).
Innovation Laboratory at Harvard
University, run by Prof. Fryer
Source: Our elaboration on official documents.
4.2 ProJovem is a national youth policy, established by Law 11129 in 2005 and modified in
2007 and 2008 in order to accomplish evaluation recommendations. It is a component of the
Sistema Unico de Assistencia Social (National System of Social Assistance) that, in accordance
with the Brazilian National Constitution, is declared as a set of integral actions delivered by both
state and civil society that pursue the goal of assenting health, insurance and social assistance.
The Program is currently conceptualized as one socio-educational service included in the Basic
Social Protection strategies developed by the state, as a coordination of social policies. It is a two
years program, in which the adolescents have to attend educational and training services
provided by Social Couches or Trainers, in Reference Centers of Social Assistance (CRAS, cofinanced by local states and federal government), or in NGO’s or community organizations.
Adolescents’ families are also visited and oriented by state social counsels.
The main aim of the program is to develop integrative actions to promote human development,
education and professional qualification. Their objectives are to complement family incomes and
social protection within the creation of mechanisms of family and community co-existence in
order to create the opportunity for enrollment, re-entering and graduation from school, and to
train and prepare adolescents for work (Decreto 6629, November 4 2008).
The population targeted by ProJovem Adolescente is youths between 15 and 17 years olds who
fall into one or more of the following categories: are members of families targeted by Bolsa
Familia; had been or are clients of penal youth system; or are former clients of Child Labour
Eradication Program (PETI) or sexual abuse or exploitation eradication programs. This is
another change introduced in 2008, since the 2005’s law did not have the present restriction to
members of specific families, whereas Agente Jovem was targeting adolescents derived from
other programs such as PETI or sexual abuse or former clients of the penal youth system (TCU,
2004).
These programs are developed in 20 to 25 individuals groups and one trainer or social orientation
agent, selected in order to accomplish some basic requisites such as age (21 years old or more)
and education (high school or greater). The agent works with the Center’s social worker, which
has the responsibility of coordinating, supervising and articulating the actions. The youths’
responsibilities are to attend a 70% minimum of programs’ activities, a 75% minimum of school
activities and to respect the rules and norms of conviviality set by the group. If they fulfill their
responsibilities, the adolescents receive a monthly incentive (100 Reais, equivalent to 328 dollars
per year).
Table 2: Projovem
Sub-program
Goals
Characteristics
ProJovem
Adolescente
Preventative policy to achieve autonomy
and citizenship while preventing social
risk
1200 hours during 24 month
and up to 48 weeks per year,
implying 12.5 hours per week.
ProJovem Urbano
To achieve higher educational levels,
training and citizenship’s participation.
2000 hours, 1560 in-class and
440 not in-class, within 18
months, comprising 3 cycles.
ProJovem Campo
To offer education in basic levels,
together
with
social
and
work
qualification
2400 hours, 1800 in-class
activities,
and
600
in
community activities
ProJovem
Trabalhador
To prepare for employment or other
economical activities through social and
professional qualification and the
promotion of work insertion.
Modalities: social consortium
of youth, youth citizenship,
school-factory,
and
youth
entrepreneurs.
Source: Our elaboration on official documents.
4.3 The Proyecto Adolescente was launched in 2006, by the Ministry of Social Development11 in
the Argentinean Province of Buenos Aires.12 Known by the public as “the little Jefes de Hogar”,
the program has certain core characteristics in common with the first nation-wide CCTs
implemented in Argentina.13 With little targeting technologies in use, the broad definition of
eligible population could be considered as not targeting at all: adolescents between 14 and 18 in
situation of social vulnerability, defined as out of school and unemployed or inactive. The
program transfers a monetary incentive, $76 to the adolescent, and $74 per adolescent to an
NGO for adolescents, for the provision of supplies, tools and books. It also pays $160 monthly
for administrative and operational costs.14 The conditionalities are to stay or to re-enroll in
school, and to attend the activities that make up the program. These activities or “projects” are
either sports, cultural, educational (mainly training or vocational) or economical. Some of the
activities are developed within the community. Also, the organization has to provide proof of
expenditures and of the payment of the monthly transfer to the adolescents enrolled. The
monthly payment (both the amount for the organization and for the adolescent) is due to the
condition of satisfactory and legal expenditures.
Table 3: Proyecto Adolescente
Components
Formal
Education
Component
Non-formal
Education
Component
Goals
Characteristics
Its goal is to promote the reenrollment,
enrollment
and
assistance to school, by means of
providing support for equality of
conditions.
Actions included could be: tutorials,
after-school support, and literacy
for children in the 7th, 8th and 9th
grades.
Its goal is to promote communitarian
actions and training, the second in
order
to
foster
adolescent’s
capabilities to gain access to jobs
and adult’s world, and the first in
order to reinforce familial, social, and
communitarian
networks
and
Actions should include participation
and
commitment
both
from
community organizations and local
governments.
11
No legal instrument, such as law or decree, enforced the Program.
The Province comprises 36% of the national population of children and adolescents –
under 18, and it is supposed that half of a million of teenagers between 15 and 19 are
out o
13 There were other programs that also transfer cash to participants, such as Plan
Trabajar, Plan Barrios Bonaerenses and others, which differ mainly in the scale and in
the time-wise perspective, being related to social assistance funds.
12
14
The program is been revised since 2008. In June 2009 there was an official presentation of changes in the amount
of transfer and in the structure, but political changes after that freeze the process.
relationships.
Social
Component
Its goal is to promote the access to
social, cultural, recreational and
sportive services that are included in
social citizenship.
Implies articulation within the
Ministry’s
and
municipalities’
programs.
Health
Component
To provide effective access to basic
health services, and to promote
healthy
behaviors
through
information for decision-making.
Implies
articulation
between
Ministry
of
Health
and
communitarian organizations
Source: Our elaboration upon official documents
4.4 The Transferences
If we pay attention to criticism of advocates and root organizations,15 it is necessary to closely
view the proportion represented by transfers in comparison with necessary resources to lift out of
poverty.16
In Opportunity NYC, the potential income represents a maximum of 24% of minimum income
necessary to not be considered poor.17 With respect of potential income for teen-agers, the
maximum represents, for instance, the 39% of annual tuition feed in public University
(www.york.cuny.edu/bursar/tuition-fees.html, fall 2009). This transfers, is necessary to
remember, does not have a minimum guaranteed.
In Brazilian case, the maximum transfer per household reaches the 78% of necessary income to
lift the household out of income poverty. The minimum guaranteed reaches the 26% of necessary
income. The monthly payment per adolescent reaches ¼ of minimum salary.
Finally, the case of Proyecto Adolescente is relatively difficult to measure, since it is no related
to the transfers to households. In this sense, the transfer directed towards adolescents is enough
to cover two minimum transportation feeds in values at December 2008.18
Table 4. Transferences and conditionalities
Transferences
Conditionalities
15
Opportunity NYC
Up to U$ 1800 per
year. Poverty line: U$
25.000 per year
Highly monitored.
Attend to school,
library card, passing
grade, annual tests,
annual credits, scores
ProJovem
Up to U$ 328 per year.
PL aprox. U$ 1428 per
year (IBGE, 09/08)
70% attendance to
programs’ activities
(1200 hrs distributed in
12.5 hrs weakly during 2
years), 75% attendance
Proyecto Adolescente
Up to U$ 252 per year.
PL aprox U$ 792 per
year (04/09 INDEC)19
Attendance to
programs’ activities
(variable), attendance o
re enrollment to school,
community activities
La Coalición contra el Hambre de la ciudad de NY estimó que el presupuesto total destinado a las personas en situación del
pobreza del estado de New York alcanza a U$ 150 por persona por año. Las estimaciones del CELS en Argentina relativas al
peso de la transferencia del Plan Jefes y del Programa Familias indican que los mismos son insuficientes respecto del monto
necesario.
16 Este cálculo supone sólo aquello que es provisto por el mercado. Las transferencias producidas por los servicios públicos no
son incluidas, lo que implica una discusión.
17 El programa se atiene a la “Regla de Oro” del Banco Mundial, relativa al máximo de subsidio que no se asocial con desincentivo laboral.
18 It is need to say that one of the aspects the program is considering to change is to
triplicate the amount transferred.
19 Existe consenso entre los/as investigadores sociales respecto a que la modificación de las formulas de cálculo realizadas por
intervención del Ejecutivo Nacional en 2007 subestiman la inflación y la pobreza por ingresos.
in annual test
Conditionalities
goals
1) Changing
behavior and
values.
2) Changes in
reference group,
community
perception of teenagers, rewards.
3) Educational
achievements.
4) Good behavior in
school.
to school, community
activities and respect of
rules of conduct.
1) Citizenship
Education.
2) Training in nonformal context.
3) Changing behaviors
and social norms
through group
interactions.
and respect of rules of
conduct
1) Training in nonformal context.
2) Cultural and
recreational
experiences that
could be
considered as
behavior and
cultural change.
3) After-school
activities to foster
academic
achievement.
Our elaboration on public documentation and interviews
4.6 Conditionalities
The analysis of transfers and conditionalities in the light of the impacts of the crisis will help us
to understand how the CCTs are trying to help the adolescents to cope and transform their
current situation of disconnectedness or exclusion. Also, it will help us to understand how
programs link their approaches to human capital and vulnerability and the adolescents’ context –
development model and / or social model.
The rationale of CCTs implies that the money is just a resource that will help to smoothes the
crisis effects with no need to use strategies that will harms in the long or intergenerational terms.
We set already that the amount of transfers itself is not enough, specially in Argentinean and
Brazilian cases, for to help the adolescents even to deal with limitations related to allocation of
educational, labor and recreational opportunities with relation to their neighborhoods.20
Furthermore, since the programs’ unit is the household as a hole or the individuals as isolated,
none of those approaches consider the strategies and decisions that are taken by the households,
and the different roles the members adopt towards different situations. As noticed by Barrientos
and Santibáñez:
“The programs focus on the household as the unit of support … sustained reductions in
vulnerability to poverty require strengthening the agency of the poor, and that this agency lies
with the household unit ... This new focus on the household as the unit of support and agency
does not preclude paying attention to significant inequalities in intra-household allocation of
income and resources.” (Barrientos and Santibáñez, 2009:11).
Programs may are translating the risk-coping value of child-labor to the adolescents, which will
certainly do differently than younger children. Economic independency (even precarious) is a
goal for many adolescents, and when not fully achieved, the income participation is a door into
adulthood, particularly for males. Therefore, prevention of early and precarious entrance in labor
market should consider, among other dimensions, how the steady income is modifying the
families’ and personal dynamic.21
20
We also lighted that segregation processes unevenly distribute the provision of these social rights through
neighborhoods, and the quality and diversity of this provision.
21 For some analyst, the combination of economics and moral approaches towards family are showing an ongoing
interest in intervene in its quality, measuring the contribution of the family to social order (Daly, 2009; Jenson and
Dobrowolsky, 2004).
In considering the potential value of conditionality itself, the programs show important
differences. First, just Opportunity has a strong relation with performance at school. We can
consider it a strong value, in the light of the most important redistributive action towards youths,
which is the redistribution of access to culture and formal credits. Still there is no evidence about
the performance of Opportunity NYC in improving adolescents’ present and future lives.
Concern is shown by advocates that highlight the counterproductive perspective on rewarding
school performance, both in term of family relations and future prospects. CEO’s report of 2008
states as a remain challenge to accomplish the goals in the adolescents’ performance, so there is
space to place a doubt about how well the program is doing even in its own terms.
For The American Diploma Project, access is not the key point, since their report states that at
least 28 percent of the 70 percent of high school graduates that enter two- and four-year colleges
immediately take remedial English or math courses. This failed performance in basic knowledge
is unevenly distributed, highly overrepresented within Latin Americans and Afro Americans
(Ready or Not, ADP Summary, accessed 3/11/09, www.achieve.org). Nonetheless, the second
year goals include achieving better performance in tests for students.
In the case of ProJovem, conditionalities place a strong effort in citizenship education and group
interactions. The evaluation shows results in the first domain, in terms of instruments of claim
and of protection and claiming against policy abuse, and knowledge of sexual rights. But it does
not perform that well in terms of see the program itself as a part of a state strategy towards social
citizenship. After the evaluation, the program seems to modify a weak relationship with labor
market. In effect, the program did not performed well in terms of integration in formal labor
market. Another weak outcome related to conditionalities is the impact in risk behavior.
Preventative interventions in this realm are difficult to measure and to implement. Even so, there
is no impact in cultural representations in favor or not opposed towards drug consumption,
violence and machismo and lack of protection. The area in which the conditionalities may
promote a change is in the avoidance of faiths as a first way to solve conflicts and delinquency as
a legitimized mean for income.
Facing educational achievements, the report also shows impact in values and expectations, while
no consistent impact in actual school attendance and performance was funded. The consistency
of expectations’ impacts could drive to two highly different hypotheses. Either the program is
enhancing the adolescent’s agency and citizenship, or is showing normalization’s face through
value’s changing and behavioral outcomes. There is some support towards a positive impact in
agency related to sexuality and violence, since adolescents are being able to avoid participation
in violence acts; they have a wider range of options in sexual protection, they hold more
information about state resources to look for help and to protect their rights. But since does not
seem to have real impact in entering the formal labor market or earning higher salaries, the
situation remains uncertain.22 Delays in achieving personal goals and difficulty to realize
projects and expectations could be extremely counterproductive.23
El informe señala impactos positivos en la preparación para el trabajo, en tanto 72% tienen Carteira de Trabalho”,
son pro-activos en la búsqueda de trabajo (39% busco en el ultimo mes), son preactivos en la preparación para el
trabajo, 52% hizo al menos un curso, y el 72.7% considera que es importante para su futuro tener una buena
profesión. La tasa de ocupación es del 41%, pero solo el 19.7% tiene trabajo formal, casi igual al 18.4% de los no
beneficiarios que cuentan con trabajo formal. No indica nada el informe respecto de la calidad del trabajo. Es
importante empezar a integrar consideraciones respecto al “empleo decente” en la identificación del empleo al que
acceden los jóvenes. Es importante articular las “puertas de salida” de los programas en función de la demanda de
autonomía de los jóvenes concebida como integración al mercado de trabajo.
23 Hay investigaciones que indican la importancia de los valores sociales para preservar a los jóvenes y adolescentes
de la entrada activa en la criminalidad, en tanto otras señalan la porosidad de esos límites culturales. Lo que no
22
In the case of Proyecto Adolescente, the relationship with formal education and formal labor
market was extremely weak. The relation with education, on the other hand, if established in the
program itself, is one of it less consistent dimensions. We found that some organizations are not
strongly committed to pursue the goal of adolescents attending to or re-enrollment in school and
the program as a mean to achieve it.24
The second area is reformed currently by the creation of a new program that split cultural goals
and labor goals. The variety of NGOs and institutions involved in the implementation, their
diverse capabilities to intervene in actions of social promotion of adolescents in vulnerability,
and the weakness of the state capabilities to monitor them, made the program a sort of black box
in terms of its outcomes and the processes that lead to them.
Projects, in the other hand, are variable in quality and type, and therefore communitarian and
cultural aspects of conditionalities are hard to address. As an example, is worth to mention that
for civil servants quality of training and experiences is not the matter, as long as the adolescents
are participating in any cultural project, showing a highly instrumental valuation of culture, sport
and leisure activities.
Some municipalities developed a relation with entrepreneur programs and social economy
projects, but civil servants commonly highlighted the lack of preparation adolescents have even
for informal or social economy projects. The necessity of reviewing of conditionalities or the
need for support was not present in their perspectives, but commonly the “lack of culture of
work” was the explanation. As shown, this leads to a more punitive and social control side of the
programs, which spread individually this supposedly culture (LLobet, 2007).
The most consistent conditionality that is spread all through organizations implementing the
“Proyecto Adolescente” is the obligation “to stay clean”. That mean, to avoid drugs consumption
and to not join the corner gang: to be at any corner with a youngster’s male group, drinking beer,
is generally seen as the starting point to commit crimes and truancy. Trainers and educators tend
to share the importance of explicitly setting this golden rule, and the adolescents groups are told
and asked frequently about it. It is necessary to say, though, this rule is shared all through
organizations working with adolescents in poverty.
The discussion also needs to highlight that whereas there is general agreement in the CCTs’
achievements in school enrolment and attendance and health care for children, it is not clear that
this is the case when considering adolescents. CCTs have been finding successful in meeting the
basic consumption needs of beneficiaries, decreasing malnutrition among young children,
increasing vaccination, increasing school enrollment, lowering drop-out rates, and reducing child
labor (World Bank, 2009). There is no proof of consistent improvement in performance in
mathematics and language learning, whereas several studies were conducted around the topic
(World Bank, 2009; Gatenio Gabel and Kamerman, 2008; Barrientos et al, 2008). Failures in
achieving the goals in one core dimension in the development of human capital aloud a more
dubious approach to the contested nature of conditionalities.
queda claro es hasta que punto esta adhesión a valores como el trabajo y la educación sirve para transformar la
situación real de los jóvenes, en tanto los impactos concretos del programa son a este respecto casi nulos.
24 The case is highly complex, since there are several aspects to put together. In Buenos Aires province, public
education is facing a very hard time in many dimensions: the quality of teachers training and educational levels, the
salary, the low quantity of class days per year, and the high rates of absenteeism due to strikes. To that social
movements and others add the lack of commitment that schools are showing with children’s and adolescents’
learning. Some social movements are criticizing formal education from Freire’s perspective on “bankary education”
and participatory approaches, signaling that stigmatization and failure is somehow produced by the school. In the
other hand, there is such an enormous heterogeneity in organizations, that one could be dubious about how much
these organizations are able to present an alternative.
In the case of conditional transfer policies developed in United States and Canada since the
welfare reform in 1996 and 1994 respectively, “data from multiple, extensive, and rigorous
studies show mixed effects on child well-being … The outcomes for school aged children are
positive; the outcomes for adolescents are negative; and the outcomes for infants/toddlers are as
yet unknown.” (Kamerman, 2004, in Gatenio-Gabel and Kamerman, 2008, 12). In the particular
realm of programs which has conditionalities related to school attendance, all the evidence is
showing impact in enrollment but not consistent outcome in attendance and there is no evidence
of any effect in learning (Gatenio-Gabel et al, 2008).
Therefore, the value of conditionalities for helping adolescents to develop human capital or
improve their social rights remains uncertain. In terms of what kind of project of development is
hold by conditionalities, certainly we can imagine that an enormous proportion of population
poorly educated, low-skilled, and rarely in contact with formal labor market will be hardly part
of an inclusionary model of development in a global society of knowledge. It will remain, in the
best case, as the reservoir army to include when salaries are high or profits are good enough to
bring them in.
4.7 How do programs portrayed adolescents?
Programs tend to consider adolescents through a category-centered approach lacking a
complementary person-centered approach. This deals difficultly with a better understanding of
the interrelations between poverty and exclusion or disconnectedness when moving out of child
poverty.25 The differences between childhood and adolescence and between youth and
adolescence are partially overshadowed, and a more holistic agenda that could consider
vulnerability as well as agency, care as well as risk, independency as well as interrelation, is also
absent.
This relational perspective brings in the issue of care and family’s representations in social
policy at the main fore of children and adolescent citizenship. Care is being claimed by feminists
as the central category to reframe participation and political boundaries of public and private,
able to reframe the approach and the ethical conception of politics (Tronto, 1994; Sevenhuisen,
1999). It is worth to ask, therefore, if adolescents are being considered subjects of care, in need
of care, and therefore vulnerable, but also as persons able to provide care and to care about
themselves and others. Risk frames to adolescence are not considering the need of care off, or the
ways in which adolescents are care providers for others. Since exclusion or disconnectedness is
at the core of interventions, it is important to re-evaluate if adolescents capability of care for
others and also their need to be cared by others could be an aspect that may strengths their
possibilities to have a valued social place at least within their neighborhoods.
Interdependency of rights, in particular when considering children and adolescents’ rights, is a
core principle to highlight in the analysis of any program. It is expressed in the ways the
programs define problems as individuals’, familiar’s, (related to a private sphere) or
communitarians, institutional, etc (related to a public sphere), and have consequences both in the
intergenerational and the gender equality. Furthermore, who is the transfer-holder –if the
children subject or parents or other institutional agent or group will be another aspect to reflect
upon.
This picture shows that further discussion on the particularity of adolescence in the light of
human rights still needs to be developed, in order to address the necessity of moving the social
policy from the social control realm.
25
It is worth to say that programs are lacking a child-poverty approach, since its rationale is a merely economic
perspective.
This is a particularly challenging aspect. As noted by Barrientos, “multidimensional
interventions raise important ethical and behavioral issues which need detailed consideration. A
key issue is to ensure that programs strengthen the agency of the poor and empower them, which
necessarily involves learning, self-realization and behavioral change.” (2008). One could argue
that, while this is a good point, if not accompanied by the institutional and perhaps social
transformations that are required in order to overcome the production and reproduction of
inequality, it will hardly address an agenda of dignity of living, freedom, and equality. It is
important to recall the fact that empowerment by itself is not an exit door for poverty if
opportunities and means are unevenly distributed, as in Latin America and United States. Again,
is not just about poverty but about social justice, as largely claimed about Latin America, a
region salient for its social inequality, not for its poverty.
5. CCTs and adolescents' citizenship
Participation, accountability and transparency are axes of analysis from a human rights
perspective. Its highlight the spaces of interaction between state (through agents and devices) and
citizens. In this chapter, we will considerer each dimension in the three programs.
Table 5: Programs’ characteristics from a Human Right Approach
Opportunity NYC
Conditionalities
Claims and
compliances
Parents
involvement
Design,
monitoring or
evaluation process
Availability of
information
Strategies of
spreading
information
Accountability
Model
Individually based
None
Through conditionalities
As data units in evaluation
processes
Website and NGO
Not developed
Mixture of technocratic
and marketized
Who
City government /
political leader
To whom
Vertical (donors)
For what
Use of public’s taxes
To what extent
Sub-contracted provision
difficult clients’ power
ProJovem
Participation
Grupaly based
None
Through consultation in the
evaluation process
As data units in evaluation
processes and in making
conduct rules
Transparency
Local governments
Through websites.
Local governments spread
information through their
own means.
Accountability
Mix between participatory
and technocratic approaches
NGOs
Participants
Local government
Horizontally accountable:
Evaluation and monitoring
units.
More than half of
beneficiaries don’t know the
federal dependence of
program
Quality of implementation,
impacts, adequacy to rules
and laws, distribution of
benefits
NGOs are monitored by the
federal state, but the results
are not necessarily available
to clients.
Proyecto Adolescente
Grupally based
None
None
In the process of establishing
conduct rules
Website and Ministry
No public information broadly
spread.
Accountability “under pressure”.
Political networking
Provincial and eventually local
governments
Partisans, NGOs with strong
connections, social movements,
international agencies.
Distribution of benefits
NGOs have to demonstrate
expenditures to the provincial and
municipal government.
Adolescents have no control or
access to it.
No control of the internal
processes.
Source: Our elaboration on official documents.
5.1 One of the permanent and transversal meanings that citizenship adopts through history is the
debate around agency and participation. In the case of adolescents, participation slides to
behavior and moral concerns. Since adults frame the context of participation and the proper ways
to participate, many expressions of agency and participation are considered inappropriate or nonparticipatory at all. Participatory spaces are most given by adults in process usually started –and
controlled- by adults. In social policy this aspect seems even more urgent, since it is usually a
realm in which adolescents have little chance to negotiate without loosing opportunities or the
access to services. Researches have shown that participatory scenarios are related to the demands
that will be legitimized (Cornwall, 2002) and different vulnerability patterns are shaped
(Tabbush, 2008).
Therefore there is a necessity to consider participation in its meanings and extension within the
programs’ conditionalities. This means not only considering if the programs are setting up formal
context to facilitate adolescents’ participation, but also the kind of participation expected, the
topics that are considered matter of participation, and what would happened if the ways
adolescents participate are not those expected by the program. Furthermore, in order to assess
social justice questions here it is necessary to consider if adolescents’ claims and perceptions of
needs are legitimized, and therefore being politicized while interpreted as rights (Fraser, 1989,
Cornwall, 2000).
In the three cases analyzed, participatory scenarios diverge enormously. In ONYC, adolescents’
participation is not considered in itself as important. The broader strategy towards
disconnectedness considers communitarian participation as a very important aspect to promote,
mainly through work in non-for-profit organizations for adolescents that are being re-included
after criminal justice processes. The program’s design included a stance of consultation through
experts and activists. Within them were organizations that advocate for poor, including
children’s and adolescents’ wellbeing and civil rights, but no adolescent was represented. With a
much stronger tradition in NGOs advocacy and involvement with the community, participation
of community members is much more ensured, whereas the extension of adolescents’
participation remains fewer. Nevertheless, grassroots organizations were claiming the lack of
real participatory process in the definition of needs, priorities and categories of population
eligible. The organizations agenda was largely overlapped by the child-center perspective hold
by some powerful actors. The organizations participating that advocate for children are seen by
poverty advocates as treating children’s interest as isolated from its families, and potentially
opposed to them. For those NGOs, parents’ views were also out of the design scope.
The conditionalities are individually-based, therefore not group or collective dimension are
promoted. This is important to highlight, since collective actions are more likely to foster voice
and empowerment within disadvantaged population than individualized ones (Kabeer, 2002).
Since the program is being tested, no specific mean to carry out claims and compliances is
designed. Demands and needs included are those directly related to formal education and jobs.
ProJovem seeks more actively to promote participation through community involvement and in
the program’s activities, as well as in the process of building group rules. The fact that the
programs build groups and it is implemented through those collective strategies is quite
important to point out. Nevertheless, the evaluation showed several aspects that raise concern
about the extension and meanings of participation. Their participation (neither parents were
consulted) is not required to better understand their needs, and there is not explicit ways to allow
them (or their parents) to monitor and/or overseeing the project and the agencies implementing
it. It is showed as a positive impact the fact that around half of the adolescents that finalized the
program seek to participate in different communitarian or political associations, but it is not clear
if this participation was previous to the program and for that reason be a way to know about the
existence of the program itself.
Proyecto Adolescente does not promote specific forms of participation, whereas as well as
ProJovem is implemented through collective projects. Some examples collected in fieldwork are
worth to mention, though. The adolescents that run a community-based broadcast were highly
unpleased with the recognition their radio programs had. As they stated during the annual autoevaluation meeting, their program was not of anybody’s interest in the community, and their
participation was nobody’s concern. The impact of these perceptions in the conditionalities needs
to be addressed.
Most of adolescents’ involved in communitarian affairs are seen by community’s leaders
condescendingly, as an expression of clientelistic manipulation or ultimately as an expression of
hope (in regards of the predominance of an ideal revolutionary youth). Demands and claims are
legitimized while related to adults’ expectations, particularly those in relation with jobs, sexual
health and in some cases gender violence. When adolescents make claims about the quality of
the training, the conflicts between programs demands and everyday life obligations and needs,
no answer seems to be provided by projects leaders, and no institutional mean is provided for
adolescents to complain.
How much the lack of specific scenarios to endure adolescents’ active participation in the
everyday program is related therefore to dynamics of exclusion of difficult “cases” remains
arguable. Nevertheless, some research outcomes are signaling the probable presence of those
processes. In particular, there is the necessity to recognize different ways and moment of
participation, since there seems to be more than official participation in evaluation or learning.
In Proyecto Adolescente and ProJovem the engagement in activities is the way to measure
participation. There is an inherent tension to these program’s goals and adolescents’ variability
of interest during the program. And no social participation process it is constant in a program’s
length. The evolving nature of adolescence and adolescent’s needs of being taking into account
need to be considered. How programs deal with the lack of visible success of adolescent’s
participation in communitarian projects? The negative impact of this double-sided experience of
empowerment and lack of power could last more than any positive impact in social rights.
Participation in practice, while being at the center of HRBA and children’s citizenship approach,
remains ambiguous. When seen from the perspective of state’s agents, participation easily turns
into users’ involvement. One aspect to remark is the positive impact in the knowledge of
ombudsman or councils for the protection and promotion of rights, fostered by ProJovem. In
middle-size municipalities, the NGOs networks are important resources for the state to better
perform in the implementation of the programs, as showed both for social policies in Argentina
and in the ProJovem evaluation. On the other hand, this could be either a sign of dependency of
the state, derived from the privatization of social services that followed the social sectors reform
during the 1990s, or a sign of state’s relational capabilities (Rodriguez Gusta, 2008). The local
context will be the scenario in which this will acquire concrete meanings, since no regulation or
tendency could be avowed.
There is no evidence of participation in the design and/or the evaluation moments for NGOs in
Brazil and Argentina, whereas those actors are engaged in implementation and consequently,
received payments from the state. This relation between state and NGOs drives to a privatized
delivery of social policies and to a disempowerment of population, which looses voice and
pressure means.
5.1 Transparency and accountability
According to Shah, ‘the power of accountability is significantly reduced if citizens are unable to
measure their governments’ performance in a meaningful way…. The abstract concept of
government performance can only be an effective tool in public debate when there are concrete
statistics measuring performance and benchmarks against which asset indicators can be
compared’ (Shah 2005, in Newell and Wheeler 23).
Both in ProJovem and Proyecto Adolescente, the state has shown a very weak ability to
supervise the implementation. In Proyecto Adolescente, municipalities were told to control the
administrative and economical procedures, which imply both the institutional documentation
necessary to operate and the expenditures control. The local administrations we research on
showed disagreements about the lack of respect for this decentralized aspect of the
implementation manifested by the provincial administration. If the local administration found
something irregular or wrong in any of the control’s dimensions under their responsibility,
organizations were able to jump over them and to reach the provincial administration in order to
avoid controls.26 Both evaluations conducted to address ProJovem outcomes and performance
showed an enormous variation within states and municipalities, ranging from the ability to meet
human resources requirements to the provision of adequate conditionalities.27
The precarious institutional structure in small towns needs reinforcements in order to implement
complex and multidimensional programs, in which the articulation of networks and the build of
spaces of debate and interchange are crucial. ProJovem’s evaluation found that the institutional
setting provided by CRAS is crucial in improvement the implementation. This type of spaces is
lacked both in Proyecto Adolescente and in Opportunity NYC, even if it necessary to say that
NYC is a local state with an enormous richness in institutional capabilities and human resources
with adequate levels of formation. The Brazilian state, in order to transform this inequality
between local states, developed an instrument of budgeting: 60% of distribution of national
budget is related to local state performance in social policies, and 40% is tied to criteria of
interregional equity. The Ministry of Social Development in Argentinean province of Buenos
Aires started a strategy of building capabilities for NGOs through workshops and specific
funding. Those strategies are crucial to improve state accountability.
26
In their perspective, ideology was the matter. Since the local administration was part of the opponent branch of the party, and
been an election’s year (2007), they were having a harder time than others. In their words, social movements with the appropriate
networks were more resourceful than them. The same was probably happening in other local governments. Currently the
administration changed, even most part of the team running the program is still there. From their perspective, they were (and are)
a “walk in” administration, were anybody could come in if they have problems with local administrators, since, again, they
political identity was a problem for them to be treated equally. The new province’s administration started a monitoring process
during 2008, but we have no information about it, called by the agents “the visits to sites”.
27 During 2004 monitoring, the TC finds that some municipalities were asking adolescents to serve in different administrative or
maintenance task with no extra payment.
Neither ProJovem nor Proyecto Adolescente developed mechanisms for to present complains or
proposals. It is not clear if Opportunity NYC has it, but in the perception of advocates it is
difficult to hold accountable the NGOs that implement social programs.
The capability to accurately manage the implementation process –not merely if the
conditionalities were accomplished- is mostly relational. Due to different sets of networks, the
Buenos Aires state carries out different degrees of involvement in implementing the program,
from merely deriving funds to engage in a sort of partnership with some actors –municipalities
and NGOs-. No common scenario is shared by state in provincial and local level and
organizations, and no public or systematic interaction is carried out.
In Latin America, the transformation in the structure of state started in the 1990s promoted a new
understanding of state’s role. Nevertheless, crucial state’s capabilities as coordination and
administrative structures are still quite weak in regard of particularistic practices that could affect
the emergence of scenarios that promote and enhance rights.
In particular, the program’s graduation or exit door remains a challenge, since adolescents are
graduating from programs either in relation with the program’s length or age limit. The relation
between social agencies that implement the CCTs programs and labor or education agencies is
crucial to overcome social control approaches. The tendency of concentrate the articulation in the
most central level of government, either national or provincial forces local implementation
process into more vertical than horizontal articulations.
In particular in the case of Proyecto Adolescente, there are aspects of horizontal accountability
within the state, in its provincial and local levels. Nevertheless, is a highly and negatively
pervasive one, since it works in weakening the control and monitor instances, and drives against
the decentralization of implementation. In terms of vertical accountability, hardly any NGO is in
position of control or claim against the state. Both due to the dependence of the funding, since
the program derives almost the same amount of money per capita to the adolescents and to the
institution; and because of the complex network and mutual relationship in with the access to
other resources, and the implementation of the program took place. These activities, while
identifying the government as a duty-bearer, are hardly finding or building institutional path to
participate and to strength citizenship, a failure that leaves the participant, especially adolescents,
but also the social movements, in a trap.28 State’s agents and the government seem to interpret
their claims in a double standard: they are not placing demands on rights, and the leaders are
manipulating the participants in their own interest. Therefore, clientelistic’s interpretations are
guiding practices and the understandings of what kind of answers are the right ones. For the
agents and public servants that are or were social movement leaders, the public claims are
extemporaneous and a sort of misunderstanding of the government intensions. As Lowndes
(1995, in Jones and Gaventa, 2002) states, culture of local government’s institutions as well as its
design are crucial dimensions in the potential for decentralized governance to enhance
participation and capabilities. Feminist studies on state emphasize the public agents’
interpretations as fundamental dimensions in social policy that have the power to defy or
reproduce gender inequality.
Merklen would not agreed on the extension of this trap to the citizenship of
participants, since for him it is possible to be part in a clientelistic network and
claim for rights and to protest against corruption (2005, pp.70). We are not claiming
that
clientelism
is
a
true
interpretation
of
adolescents’
situation,
but
clientelistic’s interpretations affect the quality and predictability of the services
provided and narrow the practices perceived as effectives.
28
If placing accountability at the intersection between rights and resources, it is worth to ask,
following Newell and Wheeler (2005) “what is the relationship between greater accountability
and people’s ability to realize their rights to resources?” Existing work on accountability
suggests there are two key dimensions to effective accountability mechanisms: answerability (the
right to make claims and demand a response) and enforceability (mechanisms for delivering
accountability, for sanctioning non-responsiveness). Adding the questions of the conditions
needed for rights to enhance accountability for the most vulnerable, and the relationship between
accountability and protection of social rights, bring us to the hypothesis of models of
accountability hold by the state, as well as the type of predominant representations on problems
and population served.
Following Goetz & Jenkis (2002), there is much to gain both from an analytical and a practical
perspective in differentiating between “vertical forms of accountability, in which citizens and
their associations play direct roles in holding the powerful to account, and horizontal forms of
accountability, in which the holding to account is indirect, delegated to other powerful actors”.
The question of the role of intermediates in social policy delivering must be raised here. Are
intermediates able to hold state and agencies accountable, while depending on their funding to
expand and eventually survive? Horizontal accountability, on the other hand, consists of formal
relationships within the state itself. The question here is what happens when horizontal
accountability fails to be achieved and political and institutional actors act as merely opponents
instead of fiscals? What if children’s rights councils are not examining social policies as a mean
to fulfill children’s rights, either for lack of resources, lack of power or lack of interest?
6. Final comments (1 page)
CCTs targeting families are considered as a flexible and effective tool to improve de situation of
families and children and address the crisis. We can presume that this could be the case since the
transference of some money, even as reduced as the programs’ amounts, is crucial in time of
economic constrains and unemployment contexts. In this regards this programs could be
important for adolescents as well. Furthermore, to consider adolescents as particular subjects,
maybe diverse than children, seems to be one important program’s strength. Does this mean
CCTs are enough? Are they the preferable policy-tools in a long-length perspective?
We started the paper stating two main questions: how are CCTs focus on adolescents formulating
the relations between human capital, development models and individual strategies and if CCTs
are enlarging adolescents’ citizenship and/or promoting their fully inclusion.
Regarding the first question, we showed the limitations that conditionalities and transfers seems
to face in order to help adolescents to overcome limitations of poverty and transformations
derived from macroeconomic trends. We also highlighted that the CCTs approach to poverty and
unemployment and training and education does not fully grasp the complex reality faced by
adolescents, whereas may be somehow helping families to cope their needs when caring for
younger children. In Argentinean and Brazilian case, education and training available form
programs’ clients is very questionable in its quality and accuracy. The same occurs with jobs
available for the population.
Some issues open by these outcomes should be better considered.
1. We would need to analyze closer the ways concentration and segmentation processes were
affected by the crisis. We need to better understand not just how the crisis is affecting the
poorest, but how the elites are reacting and the impacts that their strategies of concentration will
have, in each and within each city. New data is needed as tools for social policy design.
2. There is a need of considering together problems related to democratic governance and those
related to poverty. As shown by different crisis around the world, the ways in which each crisis
enlarges the inequality between groups, both through ways of concentrating resources and
opportunities, closing path for the poorest to access those resources, and concentrating wealth
and financial resources. CCTs are able to reduce some strong indicators related to poverty as
income and human capital assets, but there is evidence that CCTs are not performing well when
focusing on the ability of the state to eliminate the roots of poverty and inequality, and their
deleterious impact in democracy. As Degol Hailu states, “What is needed is a strategy for the
transformation of economic and social structures.” (2009)
3. Territorial approach to risk and crisis impacts may lead to a better understanding of ways
to connect local economies and development with global trends, and to understand how cities
and places were people lives are being affected, not just the national-level trends of GrossIncome or total of unemployment. May be there are two most important errors that CCTs
approach holds. Firstly, to connect micro and macro social levels through the individual’s
actions, with not enough consideration to constrictions and social determinations in, for instance,
the distribution of the territory opportunities and social-closure phenomenon. Secondly, to
identify hazardous or contingent or unexpected events just with restrictions that came from
everyday poverty. It is important to recall attention to the limitations and conservative trends that
are carried-out by moral and psychological approaches that tend to overlap monetary framings of
poverty.
4. Transformation and time are difficult to be grasped by risk approaches and CCTs:
adolescence and been male or female, and other specific ways of living and experiencing poverty
and exclusion as well as risk, vulnerability and possibilities are invisible for the programs.
Horizontal inequality that spread and differentiate life trajectories have to be analyzed together
with age and gender. Programs are gender-blind, but highly gendered.
In regard to the second question, negotiation of meanings and the everyday life extension of
citizenship it is not derived from design. Nonetheless, the lack of preoccupation about social
citizenship found in program’s design leads to a serious doubt on the extent and length of what it
is understood as exclusion and obstacle to a substantive citizenship. But if social rights are not
related to inclusion, what it is the rationale of programs that focus on exclusion or
disconnectedness? The individualistic approach to human capital, the monetary understanding of
poverty, and the statistical view of the poverty are limits to the definitions of problems and
solutions.
We hold the hypothesis that programs are more concerned about crime and social disorder, than
by how to help adolescents to be fully and autonomous part of society, a full citizen. It seems
that there is still work to do in order to develop programs that could promote rights and not just
social control. Crises are very dangerous context in this regard, but also are opportunity contexts.
Inequality at the main center of social problems and of crisis impact, neither the present
knowledge of global tendencies nor the policies’ understanding of poverty and exclusion will
help us to transform the previous situation that evolved towards half of Latin American
population living in poverty, and 1 out of 3 adolescents excluded.
It is important and necessary to promote, develop and expand policies and programs that address
the problems faced by that population. Those policies should guarantee citizenship and the full
enjoyment of rights, and not just reduce poverty levels. In order to better perform in this realm,
CCTs for adolescents –perhaps not just for them- need to reconsider how do they address
participation, transparency, accountability and conditionalities. They also need to re-evaluate if
the context in which they are actually developed evolves as its rationale assumes.
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