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This article examines the ways in which the urban poor in Argentina help one another in the arduous task of making ends meet when neither the formal labor market nor state welfare policies are able to secure their subsistence. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article makes one substantive, one analytic, and one theoretical claim. Substantively, the article argues by way of empirical illustration that the urban poor are hardworking bricoleurs. Analytically, the article demonstrates the advantages of studying poor people's strategies in a simultaneously historic and ethnographic fashion through joint collaborative fieldwork. Theoretically, the article pushes toward replacing the notions of 'strategy of survival or subsistence' with the more encompassing notion of 'strategy of persistence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a corrective to the dominant celebratory narrative about the conditional cash transfer programme in the Philippines, the Pantawid, and its associated social registry, the Listahanan. Based on extensive documentary analysis and fieldwork in the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, we argue that the targeting system has in fact been unable to function according to its primary purpose of identifying the poor and providing them social protection, despite being celebrated precisely for this purpose. This has been partly – but not only – due to the increasingly obsolescent data of the registry, which the political system has been incapable of correcting, leading to stasis at a fairly low level of coverage, at a peak of about 19 percent of national households in 2014 and since subsiding to about 17 percent by 2020, with transfer amounts at a fraction of the food poverty line. This dysfunction has resulted in a quasi-permanent group of cash payment recipients, with little or no reflection of evolving poverty profiles. This revised reading of the Pantawid and Listahanan, in what might be considered as a strong case to examine social protection performance, brings us back to the perennial problems associated with poverty targeting in even best-case social protection programmes promoted by international donors and organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit has become a significant institution within the American social safety net. Accordingly, "access to credit" talk pervades the current discourse of financial rights and equality for low-income communities. Indeed, in a rare point of convergence, both progressive and conservative accounts of optimal credit regulation for the working poor rest on the shared conviction that credit is an important tool of "social provision," the range of state policies implemented to improve general welfare. The notion that credit is a valid form of social provision for low-income Americans, however, is deeply flawed. The difficulty with credit as a form of social provision for lowincome Americans is that there is an essential mismatch between the problem and the solution. At its best, credit is a mechanism of intertemporal and intrapersonal redistribution. However, low-income Americans often struggle with persistent financial instability, and decades of data show that they can reasonably expect to be in worse economic shape as time progresses. As an essential matter, then, the problem of entrenched and enduring poverty that leaves people consistently unable to afford basic necessities cannot be addressed by a device that requires future prosperity and economic growth. Moreover, the resulting debt burden transforms credit as social provision from a form of mere intertemporal redistribution into a form of regressive redistribution, in which wealth flows out of already economically vulnerable communities. This reality has broader consequences for the middle class given its own government-sanctioned, heavy reliance on credit in the broader, persistently stagnant economic environment. Thus, our increasingly unfounded dependence on a policy of access to credit as social provision must be set aside in order to begin the difficult task of surfacing and centralizing the more pressing extent of deepening economic, and thus social, inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent decades, vagrancy has been deinstitutionalised and a welfare approach has been developed in which the problem definition of “vagrancy”, perceived as a criminal problem, has shifted into a problem of “homelessness”, defined as a poverty problem. In this article, we discuss the findings of a case study in Ghent, Belgium, in which the implications of this welfare approach to homelessness in social work practices are examined. The research method involved interviews with social workers and coordinators of homelessness care programs, analysis of policy documents and observations of intake conversations. The following issues are discussed: (1) conditionality in regular homelessness care; (2) conditionality in organisations that are directly accessible; (3) counterproductive dynamics of residual care; and (4) invisibility of those labelled as “care avoiders”. In our concluding reflections, we argue that a new sort of institutionalisation of the problem of homelessness can be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]