The special issue focuses on the impact of antipoverty measures—accounting for social and structural dimensions in the poverty experience and moving beyond an income-only focus—in five country cases: China, India, Norway, Uganda, and the United States. Particularly, we focus on the implications of shame in the delivery of antipoverty measures, as an individual and social phenomenon that relates to feelings of self-inadequacy, as well to a lack of dignity and recognition. We analyze delivery interactions through an analytic framework of rights, (...) discretion and negotiation, as this enables us to parse out how policy delivery interactions presumed or enabled individual choice, ability, control, and voice. We suggest social citizenship can structure the relationships between welfare recipients and administrators. As a concept, it expands the objects of social rights beyond the materiality of human life to include intangible processual elements in the construct of rights. (shrink)

Solving poverty is a laudable public policy goal. While there are many approaches, one that has gained popularity is the conditional cash transfer that requires recipients to satisfy conditions imposed on them such as requiring regular medical checkups. Another approach, which is gaining interest is unconditional cash transfers that do not impose conditions. The question we ask in this paper is: what do these past and current attempts tell us about the implications for gender? To answer this question, we explore (...) two programs using a gendered framework: Brazil's Bolsa Familia,which is a conditional cash transfer, and Manitoba's Mincome experiment, which was an unconditional cash transfer in Canada. We then consider how this information might be used by states, particularly as it relates to ending social marginalization. Broadly, this research contributes to academic discussions of public policy, income, gender and social vulnerability. (shrink)

Within a Norwegian labor activation program for social assistance, we explore how the presence of a work-oriented ethos shapes and changes the balance of rights, discretion, and negotiation available to and marking the interactions between service providers and program participants. We trace connections between changed delivery interactions and heightened shame or enhanced dignity for participants. Two themes emerge, the first related to an imagined institutional trajectory of progress attached to labor activation in which participants were offered “more” and the second (...) to whether participants and caseworkers had a meaningful voice in co-negotiating the terms of activation. Unrealistic optimism and an institutional focus placed on individual participants’ new responsibilities fueled a longer-term negative impact. Descriptions of enhanced rights, new possibilities for negotiation, and reported feelings of shame and frustration depended both on the participant’s distance to the labor market and on the point at which respondents were interviewed. (shrink)