Conditional Transfer of Income Programs in Argentina: tensions between provision of welfare and care

Abstract

In this article the Conditional Income Transfers Programs (PTCI) are problematized from welfare, which, as social policies, have a differential impact on the processes of inequality configuration. The PTCI have positioned themselves as the extended modes of approach to poverty in Latin America, with a presence in Argentina since the beginning of the 21st century. These modes of intervention, although they transfer income to households, affecting to some extent the well-being of families, they anchor certain behaviors of women-mothers in terms of responsibility for care based on the required conditionalities. Hence, from the documentary analysis of the PTCI implemented in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Argentina, it is concluded that if on the one hand they transfer monetary income to households in poverty, on the other, they produce and reproduce models of society where Social care is unequally assigned based on a supposed sexual division of the same. This type of state intervention privileges a sexual division of labor that defines the reproductive functions of women as mothers, positioning them as key elements to manage PTCI within households.