Mechanisms and Configuration: Understanding the Travels of a Policy Instrument

This chapter outlines the problem and the puzzle that the book addresses. Although the research has demonstrated negative or at best mixed results for gender relations and the role played by the World Bank in promoting and diffusing CCTs, fading gender equality goals in CCTs have yet to be explored and explained. This chapter underscores why the book is therefore a good case for understanding changing gender equality goals when these are institutionalized in the form of social policy and when social policy travels. To understand this trajectory, this theoretical chapter builds on insights from gender analysis and historical institutionalism (e.g., Franceshet, 2011; Jenson, 1997; Orloff, 2017; Staab, 2017) and policy innovation, standardization, and translation (e.g., Ancelovici & Jenson, 2012; Campbell, 2004; Stone, 2012). The book goes beyond the current research by stretching the analysis to include an international actor. The multi-level comparative analysis of three mechanisms—cooking, standardization, and translation—and their configurationConfiguration of gendered social policy legacies and venues, strategic (gender equality) entrepreneurs, and knowledge about gender explain how and why gender equality goals in CCT design varied as they traveled around Latin America. This configuration allows us to trace the direction of change and to map out the outcomes of CCT designs that included gender equality goals and those that did not.