Knowledge in Welfare Policies? Social Protection Policy Communities in Latin America

Considering the current state of affairs, are welfare policies in Latin America shaped mostly by wild political narratives or by evidence-based pragmatic decisions? What role does knowledge play in the policy-making process and budget allocation of social protection policies? Are these policies following any specific model of research-policy relations? (Boswell & Smith, 2017). What are the actual perceptions of the policy communities about how evidence is used for practical action? (Oliver & Boaz, 2019). Stemming from discussing what is valid knowledge in social policy and who has it, this doctoral project, aims to unpack policy communities’ (Haas, 1992; Simmons & Voss, 2018) attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions on the practices surrounding working with knowledge in the policy-making process of conditional cash transfers (CCT), as being a key case of policy transfer, discursive malleability (Heimo, 2023), political inclusion (Barrientos, 2023), and considering how the diversity of their political systems shape their welfare policies. After the peak of the neoliberal period of the 1990s, major shifts in social policies (‘The Social Investment Paradigm’), and politics (‘The Pink Tide’) occurred in Latin America around the same time. Along with this critical juncture, a stronger positivist emphasis on policy measurement was incorporated through policy transfer mechanisms. A technocratic entry point on effective policy assessment and alternative ‘truth claims’ emerged, and remained in tension between technocrats and politicians, and the policy communities overall (Bekkers et al. 2018; Bickerton & Accetti, 2021). This trend permeated the sphere of social protection as well. Drawing mainly from discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008; Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016), ideational power (Béland and Cox, 2011, 2016), and considering from which paradigms social assistance policies had been analyzed (Yörük et al., 2023), the project delves into how policy communities perceive the use of knowledge for the design, implementation, evaluation, and budget allocation of the CCT. The project involves comparing policy communities working with CCT in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. A mixed-methods tool will be introduced (Q-methodology) to define clusters within the policy communities through an inverted factorial analysis. The methodology includes interviewing the respondents, and the analysis will be carried out from a critical discourse approach. Q-methodology has been tested in studies on perceptions of EBPM from policy communities in Wales (MacKillop and Downe, 2022), and in Scotland and Wales from a comparative stance (Piddington et al., 2024). While unusual, mixed methods constitute a gap in ideational studies in policy, consequently, the contribution to the robustness of ideational perspectives through mixed methodologies is not only welcomed but encouraged (Béland and Cox, 2011:16). Further reflections stemming from critical theory on the decoloniality of knowledge and the reification of knowledge should accompany the research. This doctoral project is in its second year. Fieldwork should be finished by May 2025, and preliminary stages of analysis available by August 2025.