Seeing Like a Policy Laboratory: How the World Bank Constructed and Conferred Authority to the Policy Model of Conditional Cash Transfers

The paper investigates how the World Bank produced the policy model of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in the early 2000s. It argues that CCTs, said to have been innovated in Latin American countries in the late 1990s/early 2000s and then having rapidly spread across the continent and the globe, cannot be conceived as a simple product of observing existing national policies, but are the result of a conceptual innovation by the World Bank as a policy laboratory. The paper identifies the actual mechanisms of how a knowledge object is authorized, alluding to the importance of scrutinizing how material, literary and social technologies of knowledge production are intertwined and build on each other. Successful authoritative knowledge is reconstructed as the outcome of epistemic practices, such as impact assessments and policy evaluations, as well as economic theories. While the former built a universal out of particulars, contributing to a common form and character of CCTs, the latter embedded policy knowledge into the explanatory apparatus of development theory that forged causal theories of how observations relate to policy success. The paper explores how the networked interrelation of these mechanisms and practices supports claims of authority. Whereas diffusion theories view the spread of CCTs as the result of powerful strategic action, the paper’s perspective shows that said action is dependent on an epistemic framework and order, which prescribes possibilities of political struggle but is no less permeated by unequal power relationships, even though these might be black-boxed in the process of knowledge production. Thus, it advances interpretive approaches to policy studies by focusing on the initial construction of epistemic objects and the contribution of knowledge technologies, rather than merely pointing to powerful actors.