@article{569459b73c594d7ab81e54a106dff00f,
title = "The work of class: Cash transfers and community development in Tanzania",
abstract = "This article uses the concept of convenience as an analytical prompt to investigate how ideas about work organize a cash-based social assistance program financed through foreign aid. Productive Social Safety Nets (PSSN) is a nationwide program providing small regular payments to very poor households in Tanzania. Cash transfers as components of social assistance not predicated on working confront assumptions many Tanzanians share about the importance of work as foundational to self-reliance as the bedrock of personal and national development. The program uses existing architectures of community development to creatively combine Tanzanian values around poor people's responsibility for their own development with World Bank conceptualizations of social assistance as a productive investment. Ethnographic research at the interface between program implementors and beneficiaries provides insights into the attitudes many Tanzanians hold about development and their place in it and sheds light on the ambivalent feelings of insecure middle classes about changing forms of state-managed social assistance. Implementation involves an intricate orchestration of prescriptive ideals about labor, entitlement, and value organized around labor-intensive bureaucratic procedures, public works, and community sensitization sessions. Labor making and making visible different kinds of work characterize program implementation. Prevailing attitudes toward social assistance, and the class relations through which they are realized, are perpetuated through ostensibly novel programs.",
keywords = "Cash Transfers, Community Development, Social Assistance, Social Policy, Tanzania",
author = "Maia Green",
note = "Funding Information: I thank the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology for permission to carry out the research, Dr. Huruma Sigalla of the University of Dar es Salaam for acting as my institutional contact, and colleagues at REPOA for their collaboration over many years. I am grateful to the residents of Ulanga, Chamwino, and Temeke Districts and the many staff working with TASAF and the local government for their cooperation and assistance. The research on which this article is based was made possible by a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Support in the research locations was provided by Baraka Madelemu, Rehema Msomaji, Musa Kuliwa, and Egen Chalala. Rara Reines provided additional assistance as part of the background to this project. Thanks also to the referees for their careful reading and helpful suggestions. Funding Information: The PSSN program is mainly funded by the World Bank. Program logics creatively combine Tanzanian values around community responsibility for development with the bank's conceptualization of social assistance as productive investment using established architectures of community development. This centers on a representational distinction between the developmental disposition of hardworking middle‐class people and the moral frailty of the poor, whose proclivities toward handouts and reliance on others mean they require mobilization (Dawson and Fouksman 2020 ; Seekings 2017 ). Implementation involves an intricate orchestration of prescriptive ideals about labor, entitlement, and value organized around labor‐intensive bureaucratic procedures, public works, and community sensitization sessions that accompany cash payouts. Labor and making visible different kinds of work characterize program implementation. The modeling of social assistance as transitional welfare mediated through the middle class as development exemplars builds on long‐standing understandings of development in Tanzania informed by colonial and postcolonial practices of community development (Chachage 1988 , 201). Prevailing attitudes toward social assistance, and the class relations through which they are realized, are perpetuated through ostensibly novel programs (Steensland 2006 ). making Funding Information: I thank the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology for permission to carry out the research, Dr. Huruma Sigalla of the University of Dar es Salaam for acting as my institutional contact, and colleagues at REPOA for their collaboration over many years. I am grateful to the residents of Ulanga, Chamwino, and Temeke Districts and the many staff working with TASAF and the local government for their cooperation and assistance. The research on which this article is based was made possible by a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Support in the research locations was provided by Baraka Madelemu, Rehema Msomaji, Musa Kuliwa, and Egen Chalala. Rara Reines provided additional assistance as part of the background to this project. Thanks also to the referees for their careful reading and helpful suggestions. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 The Authors. Economic Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on behalf of American Anthropological Association.",
year = "2021",
month = may,
day = "29",
doi = "10.1002/sea2.12218",
language = "English",
volume = "8",
pages = "273--286",
journal = "Economic Anthropology",
issn = "2330-4847",
publisher = "John Wiley & Sons Ltd",
number = "2",
}
