The Vicious Cycle in the Bolsa Família Program’s Implementation: Discretionality and the Challenge of Social Rights Consolidation in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to consider conceptions of the Brazilian conditional cash transfer Bolsa Família Program as elaborated by both those responsible for its implementation and its beneficiaries in Northeast Brazil. Most innovative in this study is the adoption of the program’s municipal social workers, who are responsible for the implementation of the program, as the main observation point, by conceptualizing them as street-level bureaucrats. The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place between 2013 and 2015, for a total of six months, combined with in-depth interviews with the program’s beneficiaries in a middle-sized municipality of the State of Ceará. Social workers enjoy a range of discretion that directly affects the distribution of benefits. Their efforts to better apply what they see as scarce resources are embedded in their representations of poverty—separating “deserving” from “undeserving” poor—generating insecurity among beneficiaries. By doing so, beneficiaries’ understanding of the program as a social right is compromised, which is reinforced by a fragile legal status enjoyed by the Bolsa Família and ambiguous bureaucratic procedures.