Falling through the Cracks: Digital Infrastructures of Social Protection in Ecuador

Abstract

While cash transfers gain prominence as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a strong impulse to regard them as a stepping-stone towards the formalization of employment and universalization of social protection. This contribution problematizes how populations in informality are included in narrowly targeted social assistance interventions, which are heavily reliant on targeted schemes and fail to make informality legible to programme administrators. The focus of the article lies in the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate digital infrastructures, particularly data infrastructures such as social registries, that are used to target Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVID-related programme Bono de Protección Familiar. The article is based on ethnographic work, interviews and narrative analysis. It finds that social registries compiled for proxy means testing weaken the link between eligibility and informal employment and obscure the processes that perpetuate precarity. More recent data innovations, such as machine learning, are also insufficient to locate vulnerable workers as they learn from historical social registries data and replicate their biases, for example by overlooking non-poor areas where informal employment also occurs. Data infrastructures have shifted attention to the technicalities of the selection of beneficiaries and away from power imbalances in the design of social assistance, despite their selectivity and politics.