Optics of the State: The Politics of Making Poverty Visible in Brazil and Mexico

• In Event: 4332 - Welfare and Social Control

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 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 information systems to see and monitor poor individuals. Looking comparatively at projects intended to make 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, but had the unanticipated effect of rendering the state itself visible and thus subject to intense scrutiny. My findings are based on the analysis of a rich set of empirical data, including official documents, academic papers, media articles, and 100 in-depth interviews with top government actors and poverty experts in Brazil and Mexico.

Author

• Luciana de Souza Leao, University of Michigan