Why did gender equality, once explicit in Mexico’s pioneering Progresa program, fade from the design of subsequent conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs as they spread across Latin America? Why did Brazil only acknowledge it implicitly, while Peru and Bolivia designed programs that reproduced gender inequalities? And how did the World Bank, in promoting CCTs as a global best practice, contribute to this shift?
These are the guiding questions of Nora Nagels’s new book Gender Equality in Conditional Cash Transfer Designs: A disappearing policy recipe in Latin America and the World Bank? Rather than assessing the implementation and the outcomes of CCTs – anti-poverty programs that transfer cash to poor households, conditional on compliance with requirements such as school attendance and health checkups –, Nagels focuses squarely on their design. This choice is significant because poverty alleviation and gender equality are often seen as mutually reinforcing. Yet, as Nagels shows, the very programs meant to reduce poverty frequently sidelined or even reinforced gender hierarchies. She highlights that policy design is not a neutral, but rather a gendered and gendering practice: from their conception, policy instruments reflect and reproduce assumptions about gender, particularly about gender relations and the gendered division of labor, in this case often positioning men as workers and women as carers. In this way, CCT designs sensitive to gender equality are those that seek to empower women by expanding their financial autonomy, while those that do not display such sensitivity target primarily mothers because they are presumed to be better spenders on behalf of their children.
To account for the “fading goal of gender equality” in the Latin American leg of the travel of CCT designs, Nagels grafts gender analysis onto historical institutionalism, developing a middle-range, mechanistic theoretical framework. By centering her analysis on mechanisms, Nagels foregrounds the micro-level processes that lead to certain outcomes in certain contexts at certain times, in contrast to variable-centered approaches that stop at correlations and avoid tracing the causal chain linking actors, institutions, and ideas. Three mechanisms structure her analysis: cooking, the creation and development of new CCTs out of previously existing elements or “ingredients”; standardization, the selection, certification, decontextualization and framing of successful CCTs into simplified, exportable templates; and translation, the local adaptation of these standardized CCT recipes. These mechanisms explain how CCTs were transformed as they traveled. To explain why gender equality goals disappeared in CCT design, Nagels emphasizes the political configuration in which each mechanism operated, composed of institutional legacies and venues, strategic (gender equality) entrepreneurs and knowledge about gender.
The empirical heart of the book is a multilevel comparison of five detailed cases: Mexico and Brazil as the pioneering cooks of CCTs in Latin America, the World Bank as their standardizer, and Peru and Bolivia as their translators. This skillful research design enables her to move beyond purely domestic factors such as the left-right cleavage and instead zero in on tracing how mechanisms interacted with political configurations at both national and international levels. Drawing on the administrative, specialized and academic literature as well as fieldwork interviews in these countries and in Washington, D.C., Nagels reconstructs the political and epistemic struggles that shaped CCT design in Latin America.
Nagels begins with Mexico and Brazil, where CCTs were first cooked. In Mexico, feminist technocrats embedded in the Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO), backed by the Ministry of Finance and legitimated by global feminism after Beijing 1995, designed Progresa (1997), linking poverty alleviation with gender equality. Progresa stands out here as a rare case where gender equality goals, through larger incentives for girls’ school attendance and the transfer of the cash payments to women, were included from the start, something subsequent programs would dilute or discard. Brazil’s Bolsa Família (2003), by contrast, acknowledged gender equality only implicitly. Though shaped more by coalitional politics than feminist entrepreneurship, its generous selection criteria and assignment of transfers to women nonetheless enhanced women’s autonomy, even if empowerment was not articulated as an objective.
The World Bank assumed the role of standardizer in the 2000s, reframing CCTs as portable, evidence-based pro-poor policy tools. In the process, gender objectives were discarded. Nagels highlights the epistemic politics often at play here: quantitative economists dominated the conversation, while qualitative and feminist expertise was marginalized. Gender equality goals survived only as an instrumental rationale, whereby mothers were targeted because they were believed to maximize investments in children, not because empowerment was valued. Nagels’s account of epistemic politics does not break entirely new ground, since feminist critiques of the World Bank’s evidence-based orthodoxy are well established. What she adds is a mechanism-based explanation of how those epistemic hierarchies mattered for CCT design: by privileging what was quantifiable and portable, the World Bank’s standardization process systematically stripped out empowerment goals.
In Peru and Bolivia, latecomers to the CCT wave, standardized models were translated into contexts marked by exclusionary legacies. Peru’s Juntos (2005), designed by technocrats from the Ministry of Economy, imposed heavy conditionalities that reinforced women’s caregiving role, while excluding feminist actors and civil society organizations from design debates. Bolivia’s Bonos Juancito Pinto (2006) and Bono Juana Azurduy (2009), introduced under Evo Morales, were presented as universalistic and anti-neoliberal but entrenched maternalist assumptions. Extra-official conditionalities often stigmatized Indigenous women’s practices, reproducing racialized and gendered exclusions. Across these cases, Nagels concludes, only strategic gender-equality entrepreneurs, embedded in supportive institutions and legitimized by feminist knowledge, were able to cook CCT designs that institutionalized gender equality goals; where such actors, institutional legacies and knowledge were absent, a lack of gender equality goals or even outright gender inequality goals prevailed.
Nagels intervenes in two main bodies of scholarship. First, she advances the CCT literature by focusing on design as an arena where assumptions about women’s roles are codified and institutionalized. Second, she pushes the policy diffusion and transfer literature beyond its emphasis on convergence. By contrast, her mechanism-based account stresses that “what moves changes during travel,” and that this variation must be explained through context-sensitive causal processes. Her concept of “political configurations” illuminates why the same policy instrument yielded divergent policy designs in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.
Methodologically, Nagels embraces an interpretive turn, combining process-tracing with extensive fieldwork interviews. This multi-level, multi-sited research enables her to reconstruct the micro-foundations of design processes: not only the disputes among technocrats in Mexico and the “extra-official conditionalities” she uncovered in Peru and Bolivia, but also the informal and often intimate ties through which feminist knowledge circulated. Here, the book distinguishes itself: few studies of policy travel rely on such deep qualitative work across both domestic and international settings, and it is this richness that allows Nagels to show how ideas about gender were contested, transmitted, and ultimately institutionalized or excluded in CCT design.
One of the book’s strengths lies in the portability of its framework. Though elaborated for CCTs in Latin America, the concepts of cooking, standardization, and translation could be fruitfully applied to other traveling policy instruments. Future scholarship should take up this endeavor, situating the framework in comparative perspective and testing how far its mechanisms can explain policy travel across diverse contexts. Would these mechanisms operate similarly in other regions? Does the World Bank always play the role of standardizer, or might regional development banks assume that function elsewhere?
Nagel’s book also underscores the risks of transplanting policy instruments without careful attention to context. The World Bank’s reliance on quantitative, portable indicators, as well as its blindness to feminist and qualitative evidence, meant that gender equality goals were sidelined in CCT design in Peru and Bolivia, despite extensive feminist scholarship documenting the link between poverty and gender inequality. At their core, CCTs aim to break cycles of poverty. As Nagels shows, the real question is whether they also dismantle the gendered hierarchies that sustain those cycles. Her book makes clear that this hinges on whether feminist and local knowledge is allowed a seat at the table, among other abovementioned factors.
This book will be of interest to scholars of Latin American social policy, gender, development and policy design and diffusion, as well as policymakers and activists concerned with the politics of anti-poverty programs. For academics, alongside an in-depth comparison of Latin American CCT program designs, it provides a tractable, multi-level template for analyzing policy travel with attention to causality and mechanisms. For policymakers, it is a reminder that empowerment is not an automatic byproduct of targeting women with cash transfers, but a design choice that depends on supportive institutions, strategic actors and knowledge regimes that take gender seriously. For advocates, Nagels’s analysis is thus both a call to build stronger transnational feminist coalitions and a sobering reminder of the structural headwinds they confront.
