‘Good citizenship’ and the promotion of personal savings accounts in Peru

Abstract

Drawing upon the tools of Foucaultian-inspired governmentality, this article traces the narratives of ‘good citizenship’ that are normalized through contemporary programs to promote asset accumulation through formal savings. It suggests that savings promotion programs embody a particular conception of good citizenship defined by a neoliberal ethos of individual risk management and asset accumulation. It traces this through the Proyecto Capital program to promote personal savings accounts, which is being implemented in conjunction with Peru's conditional cash transfer program Juntos. It pays attention to the capacities, habits, and attitudes which these programs seek to foster, and locates these within a longer, discontinuous history of citizen improvement and reform. In doing so, it aims to disrupt the promotion of formal savings as a common-sense solution to poverty.

Keywords::

• citizen
• Peru
• risk
• assets
• neoliberal
• governmentality

Notes

^1. See Cecchini and Madariaga (2011) for an overview of the impacts of CCTs in the region to date.

^2. Hernando de Soto's The Other Path (1990) provided an important ‘blueprint’ for the redefinition of development as asset accumulation, arguing that the path to development to allow the poor to accumulate assets that ‘count’ through the recognition of private property and commercial activities. He pointed to the high barriers and costs to formal land-titling, housing, and commercial/industrial activities and highlighted the financial costs (rather than causes) of informality, arguing for legal and institutional reforms to ensure regulation and recognition of property rights and commercial activities, which would allow people to accumulate assets and compete in the market.

^3. Freedom for Sen is defined by an individual's ability to make ‘effective’ desired choices to alter their life, and it is this enhancement of capability to do this that becomes the new ‘ends’ of social programming (Sen 1999, Jayasuriya 2006). Those subjects who are not yet ‘free’, by this measure, require development intervention in order to realize their agency/freedom.