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The point of departure for this thesis was that a social policy model based on social investment principles became dominant in Latin America at the end of the 20th century. Conditioning a cash transfer on requirements of human capital accumulation became the prevailing idea on the anti-poverty and development agenda in Latin America and subsequently in other development contexts. The policy model was built to tackle persistent and extreme poverty by attempting to reduce poverty in the short-term and by breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty in the long-term. Nearly all countries in Latin America, and several others in the Global South, have implemented a CCT regardless of government ideologies and political perspectives, which raises interesting questions on the substantive content of the idea and its ability to appeal to such a diverse group of politicians and policymakers. In this thesis the idea of CCTs is studied from a broad theoretical perspective. I approach CCTs through the framework established most particularly by Jal Mehta (2011) who views ideas as problem definitions and as policy solutions. Through this framework I examine the underlying theoretical principles and assumptions that have guided the policy formation of conditional cash transfers, while assessing some of the factors that make the policy model so appealing to governments from different ideological backgrounds. The study is mainly carried out as a theoretical policy analysis, but in addition to the theoretical part of the study, I got an opportunity to study a particular conditional cash transfer in practice through a case study research strategy. The conditional cash transfer program of the Autonomous city of Buenos Aires, Ciudadania Porteña, is studied as empirical proof of the conditional cash transfer phenomenon. This study suggests that the policy idea of conditional cash transfers merges different social policy traditions and different, sometimes contradictory, theoretical principles. CCTs can be seen as representing rights based social protection, residual and cost-effective targeted social protection and economically productive social protection based on social investments. I argue that as hybrid social protection programs conditional cash transfers have the potential to gain legitimacy and appeal to a wide range of policymakers based on the underlying ideas that can be framed from different angles allowing them to be perceived as a proper solution to various problems, constructed from various perspectives.

Background of INCASI Project H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 GA 691004. WP1: Compilation