Institutional supply and agency rationales: women on welfare in six Latin American metropolis – LATINASSIST

In this project we wish to study the social effects of public welfare policies implemented in Latin America, in six large cities (Buenos Aires, Bogotá, São Paulo, Guadalajara, Havana, Santiago de Chile). These welfare programmes represent a new generation of public policies, in which various institutional public actors play a role at different territorial scales, as well as international, national or local, private, profit and non-profit organisations,

Latin America has been the experimental laboratory of this new generation of policies conceived as intermediary mechanisms between social protection and the struggle against poverty, which generate a "right to social assistance", in a context where social insurance systems, instituted for the most over half a century ago, have suffered from economic and political reforms of the state as well as demographic and labour market changes.

Rooted in charitable, social or human right frameworks, resorting to social or security control methods, to contractualisation or conditionalities, these policies are intertwined with various initiatives, aiming at women empowerment or the promotion of economic activity, improvement of health or educational status, territorial cohesion or the reduction of discrimination. Women often happen to be their main targets, because of their social roles, of their potentialities, their capacities, of the discrimination they are subject to or the transformation of family structures.

We wish to evaluate the social effects of some of these social interventions in terms of agency rationales, relational configurations (family, gender, social), as well as the various uses of public policies and institutional supply they foster - i.e. intentional or non intentional effects, including resistance. We would like to examine the different individual and collective positioning, social status and identity they seem to mobilise, from women who are their declared beneficiaries as mothers, workers, retired workers, poor, etc.

What do beneficiaries do with welfare assistance, and how does welfare affect its beneficiaries, particularly when they are women? How is the transferred cash used? How are behaviours, social relationships within and outside the family, representations transformed? How do relations in private spheres, on work sites, within communities, evolve (between men and women, between generations), how do women beneficiaries adapt their strategies to their new status and occupational and personal opportunities, once they become welfare beneficiaries? Which relational patterns are being promoted between institutional welfare supply and beneficiaries, and who are the mediators of these patterns? How do these patterns impact citizenship regimes?

The project will thus contribute to the reflection on social changes triggered by woman-targeted social policies, whose paradigms, methods and rationales circulate in most developing countries, if not beyond. The scientific and professional networks we are integrated into will allow for an amplification of our contribution to these debates at international level through publication, dissemination, teaching and consulting.

The project finally aims at feeding into a theoretical debate, taking place in Europe as well as in other regions of the world, focussed on the management of social issues and problems spurring in a globalisation context, on the role of social policies towards helping social groups who are loosely or not integrated within statutory wage labour to cope with social risks, as well as on the relationship between assistance and employment. More generally, our work will contribute to the debate bearing on the role of social policies towards building social cohesion and state legitimacy.