Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico (1995-2015)

• In Event: 4352 - Order and Disorder in Comparative Historical Research

Abstract

This paper builds on and refines James Scott’s argument about legibility (1998) by providing an in-depth, comparative analysis of how Brazil and Mexico made the individual poor visible for the purposes of implementing their new 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 informational challenges; yet they adopted very different solutions to make CCTs governable. Specifically, Brazil and Mexico implemented their CCTs through different governance structures and they developed distinct poverty knowledge regimes – the combination of institutional arrangements and policy tools – to see and to monitor the individual poor. Looking comparatively at projects of making poverty visible and governable, I argue that the differences and consequences of these legibility projects depended on the symbolic strategies of political legitimation of state action, on the one hand; but that they had the unanticipated effect of making the state itself visible, and into an object of intense scrutiny, on the other. Data for this research comes from a rich set of official documents, academic papers, media articles and 90 in-depth interviews with key government actors and poverty experts in Brazil and in Mexico.

Author

• Luciana de Souza Leao, Columbia University