Género y apropiación de la perspectiva de inversión social en Bolivia: el sistema de los Bonos

Abstract

Like most Latin American countries, Bolivia adopted a new instrument of social assistance policies that was considered as the best way to fight poverty in the international area of development: Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCT). These belong to the social investment perspective in the post-Washington Consensus. According to this perspective, CCT’s aim in the short term was to reduce poverty by increasing the money supply of households and in the long-term, it was to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty by investing in human capital for future generations. The appropriation of this perspective in Bolivia with the Bonos’ system was mediated by the new Plurinational State that included indigenous collective rights. Using a qualitative methodology of discourse analysis, this paper studies the “developmentalist” configuration of the Bonos and the interactions among policymakers and women recipients. An analysis of the interviews with policy makers and women recipients highlights that in Bolivia this new perspective reproduced old features of Latin American social policies: maternalism and neocolonialism.

Keywords

• gender
• social policies
• conditional Cash Transfer (CCT)
• social investment
• neocolonialism