Expectancies beyond development: Towards a prospective chronology of cash transfer from Mexico to Argentina

Abstract

In this paper, we reconstruct the anticipatory scenarios towards which cash transfer programs have been implemented in two Latin American countries. Given that the fulfillment of cash transfer objectives can neither be calculated empirically nor rationally a priori, we use the concept of "imaginary future" for their analysis. We posit that there are three different objectives and fictional expectations that proliferate in Latin American cash transfers: socio-political pacification in the short term, market inclusion in the long term, and construction of new citizenship and a more distributive society in the very long term. We classify and date these changing objectives and developing expectancies into three “waves” of CCT implementation (1997-2001), (2002-2008) and (2009-).