TO CONDITION OR NOT TO CONDITION? 63
(Baird, McIntosh, and Özler, 2010, 19). This is the first evidence on condition- ality in Africa and the first study designed to empirically test conditions versus no conditions. Albeit limited to one study, it does suggest that conditions may not be necessary to achieve education impacts in some contexts.
Choice, Autonomy, and Power One of the conditionality debates revolves around the social implications of state-imposed behavioral change. Whether a CCT involves state imposition can itself be debated, because people can opt out of the program. In this sense CCTs can be seen as a form of self-targeting, in the same way that public works are; in the latter, people choose whether to work, weighing the costs versus the benefits. The state is not forcing behavior change but rather changing the “price” of decisions; with CCTs they are compensating parents for the loss of child labor so that the price of schooling becomes cheaper. A price subsidy could be seen in the same way—as not forcing people to buy a certain item but changing the price to influence choices. If a policy decision is to be made between an unconditional and a conditional cash transfer, a factor to be considered is that there is comparatively more imposition in the case of the conditional transfer. In the conditionality debate, the imposition of conditionality can be seen
as both a problem and a strength, depending on one’s perspective. The prob- lem lies in the loss of autonomy implied by the imposition. Schubert and Slater (2006, 576) argue that a conditionality cost–benefit analysis should take into account “dimensions of human dignity, self-esteem and autonomy. . . . Imposing conditions on people may smack of top-down attitudes of ‘we know better’ and ‘the poor cannot be trusted’” to make good decisions. Although CCTs do have this flavor of paternalism, parents are not really making an autonomous “decision” when they take their children out of school because they cannot afford fees and supplies or because the children are needed to work in the fields. In this sense, by decreasing the “cost” of a schooling deci- sion, a CCT can be seen to increase parents’ real choices about whether to educate their children. On the other hand, a UCT would give them even greater choice. In laying out the pros and cons of conditionality, Samson raises the concern that conditions “deprive the poor of freedom to choose appropriate services—and to freely make decisions to improve household welfare” (Samson 2006). The fact that people choose to make use of services even without conditions is an indication that they do not necessarily need the state to require them (although the extent to which they will make these decisions with an unconditional rather than a conditional transfer is not known). More controversially, reversing the autonomy argument, conditional-
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