The trouble with money: Argentina’s conditional cash transfers

Much work on conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) focuses on the problem of conditionality. This paper, however, looks at the significance of the cash part of the equation for Argentina’s Asignacion Universal por Hijo para Proteccion Social in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires Province. Unsurprisingly, beneficiaries of cash transfers welcome these payments which have made a real difference in their life circumstances. Yet putting cash, in this case via electronic bank transfer, into the hands of Argentina’s poor mothers has a range of effects over and above the obvious material benefits. Building on the insights offered by scholars of money, in particular thinking about the qualities of fungibility and anonymity, the article shows how CCTs empower while constraining; they constitute women as economic citizens while requiring their incorporation into the bank system, under the gaze of state regulation; they fail, in this instance at least, to liberate mothers from the stigma of welfare.