“Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico (1995-2016)”
In this talk, I aim to build on and refine James Scott’s argument about legibility (1998) by providing an in-depth, comparative analysis of how Brazil and Mexico rendered poor individuals visible in order to implement poverty-alleviation programs. In the mid-1990s, these two states implemented the same policy (conditional cash transfer programs, or CCTs), facing very similar political, organizational, and information challenges; yet they adopted different solutions for governing their respective CCT programs. Specifically, Brazil and Mexico implemented their CCTs by means of distinct governance structures, and they developed distinct data infrastructures to identify and monitor poor individuals. Looking comparatively at projects intended to make poverty visible and governable, I show that these differences depended on the strategies of political legitimation of each CCT, and had unanticipated, long-term effects for the implementation of the two programs and for social policy more broadly in both countries. My findings are based on the analysis of a rich set of empirical data, including approximately 10,000 pages of official documents, 14 months of fieldwork in Brasília and Mexico City, and 90 in-depth interviews with political and bureaucratic elites in Brazil and Mexico.