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Recent decades have witnessed the globalisation of policies promoting social cash transfers as a critical instrument for poverty reduction. Among various approaches, the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) model promoted by the World Bank has gained discursive dominance in countries where this strategy, and its technical model for implementation, appear more attractive than competing alternatives. While research has evaluated CCT programmes and considered the politics of development that they represent in Latin America, researchers are yet to explore the constitutive effects of CCT ways of knowing and measuring poverty in the societies of rural Asia. This paper explores the consequences of CCT knowledge politics in rural Indonesia. It argues that CCT practices of knowing and measuring have paradoxical effects. The programme makes direct payments to millions of impoverished households, producing well-documented patterns of inclusion and advancement. Yet, CCT knowledge practices involve simplifications and generate significant mis-targeting, eliciting a never-ending repair process among state actors, local leaders, and communities. This metricised knowledge system depoliticises political questions of distribution. It conceals alternative ways of knowing and addressing poverty, producing an order of entitlements somewhat at odds with established community logics of inclusion, while provoking a local politics of distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why illegal fees persist at public health facilities in Indonesia. It suggests that their persistence reflects the political dominance of a coalition of interests consisting of politico-bureaucratic elements in the state apparatus and major business groups and the implications this has had for government spending on the health sector and programmes aimedat providing free health care to the poor in particular among other determinants of the level of illegal fees. Accordingly, the paper concludes that eliminating illegal fees from Indonesia's public health system requires not simply better funding of public health facilities and better change management, as much of the comparative health economics literature suggests – although these are certainly part of the solution – but also efforts to empower the poor and their allies vis-à-vis this coalition of interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]