Extending the State, Shaping Citizenship: Cash Transfers and Citizen-State Relations in Rural East Africa
My book project examines the transformative impacts of state social assistance, and in particular cash transfer programs, on the relationship between the citizen and the state. As I demonstrate, similar cash transfer programs have had profoundly different effects on the perception and practice of citizenship in Kenya and Tanzania.
The book address this puzzle directly, and argues that the differing impacts of cash transfers for citizen-state relations is the result of variations in the formal and informal avenues through which marginalized citizens access the resources and structures of the state. The book traces these variations back to long-term processes of post colonial state formation that, in turn, shape the transformative potential of contemporary social policies. In Tanzania, the post-colonial nation-building project constructed a cohesive national identity and made possible a cohesive and duty-based conception of citizenship that is deeply rooted in perceptions of a singular national community and norms of reciprocity. The introduction of means-tested cash transfer programs in Tanzania, then, did not challenge commonly-held understandings of citizenship and of the state’s role vis-à-vis the citizen. In contrast, in Kenya, the post-colonial era was marked by the distribution of state resources through patronage networks, exclusionary economic and political policies that discriminated based on ethnicity and an absence of a central unifying nation-building project. This fostered an exclusive, entitlement-based conception of citizenship, which is directly tied to the individual and their relationship to various patrons. The introduction of cash transfer programs, which are distributed based on need rather than patronage, has led to a gradual reconceptualization of citizenship towards one rooted in reciprocal rights and duties.
In addressing this empirical puzzle, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which social policies can have transformative effects for citizen-state relations. The book demonstrates that social policies, such as cash transfers, are mostly likely to be transformative in contexts where citizens have been marginalized from the resources and structures of the central state. In such contexts, if widely accessible and implemented according to clear and public criteria, cash transfers can provide recipients new pathways to access the structures of the state and alter recipients’ common discourses about the state. Together this creates what I term “inclusive perceptions and practices of citizenship” amongst recipients – affective attachment to the nation-state and a widespread ability to access and lay claim to the structures and resources of the state. The book shows that the power of cash transfers to effect dynamics of state-society relations emerges from their ability to reconfigure both citizens’ quotidian interactions with and their perceptions of the state.
To make this argument, the book draws on rich qualitative work to trace the effects of similar cash transfer programs in both Kenya and Tanzania. Empirically, the book draws on over two years of in-depth fieldwork in Kenya and Tanzania between 2015 and 2018, including more than 800 interviews with ordinary citizens, government officials and development partners, 32 focus groups and 15 months of participant observation across eight rural communities. The research design leverages both within- and cross-country variations in the implementation of cash transfers to identify the causal mechanisms linking cash transfers and citizen-state relations.
Alesha Porisky, PhD 