International Political Sociology (2013) 7, 294–312 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion: The Case of Truth Commissions and Conditional Cash Transfers Marcos Ancelovici Universit
e du Qu
e bec a Montr
e al (UQAM) and Jane Jenson Universit
e de Montr
e al The study of the transnational transfer of practices and institutions generally looks at the intermediary and final stages of the process, with much less attention devoted to its initial steps. In contrast, this article theorizes the early part of the trajectory of transfer, conceptualized as the process through which local ideas and practices are turned into a “standard model,” which we term the process of standardization. Drawing upon the public policy and social movement literatures, we identify three potentially robust mechanisms as central to the process of standardization—certification, decontextualization, and framing—and apply this framework to two cases: the transnational spread of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the use of conditional cash transfers as a social policy instrument. We find that the key actors in shaping the content of these standards were neither the innovators nor the early adopters but intermediary entrepreneurs located at the intersection of a complex mix of state and nonstate networks. Recent decades have seen a multiplication of transnational networks and linkages, making it obvious that neither the origins of public policy nor the scale of collective action is confined within national borders. The mechanisms that forge transnational linkages and open pathways for the transfer of practices and institutions across borders are not, however, clear-cut, and—we will argue here— could be better understood. This article outlines a framework that applies as much to public policy as to NGOs and social movements. Our proposition is that there are mechanisms common to the development of public policy instruments and social movement claims-making. These mechanisms are linked in a process that can be termed “standardization.” The focus of this proposition, and thus the analysis, is on the initial portion of any process of transfer. It theorizes the early part of the trajectory of transfer, conceptualized as the process through which local ideas and practices are turned into a “standard model.” The analysis is not intended for consideration of the fate of such models once exported and adopted, which is the diffusion phase of transnational transfer. Put differently, it aims at accounting for the generation of Ancelovici, Marcos and Jane Jenson. (2013) Standardization for Transnational Diffusion: The Case of Truth Commissions and Conditional Cash Transfers. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/ips.12024 Ó 2013 International Studies Association Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 295 a “standard model” rather than its subsequent spread, adoption, and adaptation to local circumstances.1 To this end, the paper builds on the recent turn to mechanisms in the social sciences (Hedstr€ om and Swedberg 1998; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Gerring 2007a; Falleti and Lynch 2009). Drawing upon the public policy and social movement literatures, we identify three mechanisms as central to the process of standardization: certification, decontextualization, and framing. After briefly assessing the literature, we present the concept of standardization, introduce the three mechanisms, and discuss how our particular approach fits in the debate on mechanisms. We then apply our notion of standardization to two cases: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) and a popular social policy instrument, conditional cash transfers (CCTs). In contrast to many studies of transfer, both of these cases have their origins in the Global South rather than the North. Transnational Transfer of Policy and Claims-Making Over the last 20 years, scholarly attention has increasingly focused on the transnational transfer and (in particular) the diffusion of public policy (Dobbin, Simmons and Garrett 2007). The primary focus of these approaches is the policy process of national states and international organizations (IOs). One result is that they pay limited attention to nonstate actors, either as contributors to the making of public policy or as promoters of models of collective action norms and practices. For their part, the abundant literatures about social movements and organizations consider the spread of collective action practices by discussing “traveling” frames, tactics, organizational models, innovations, and so on, but often without sufficient attention to institutions such as think tanks and IOs which promote the export of practices and models.2 These organizational and social movement literatures have limitations when applied to our topic. They generally attempt to explain the behavior of adopters, rather than exporters, of ideas and standards. Their main focus is the “localization” of ideas, practices, and norms to fit a particular context, rather than the formatting of those ideas, practices, and norms to make them suitable for export. They are thus primarily interested in the final rather than initial steps of the process of transfer, and, as a result, they overlook the fact that before ideas and practices spread, there may have been political and cultural work done to make them generic and transferable. The public policy literature, too, has little to say about the ways policies are transformed into acceptable formats. When attempting to explain why only some ideas are diffused, analysis generally turns to the legitimacy of the ideas, the power of their advocates, and their capacity to solve certain problems and rally critical supporters. But not all ideas, practices, or policies become generic standards. For example, in his conclusion to an influential edited volume on the diffusion of Keynesian ideas, Hall (1989) stressed the economic, administrative, and political viability of these ideas. We might ask, however, a prior question: How was this given set of ideas assembled and formatted for export? How was this policy package, or blueprint, called “Keynesianism” rid of its local and contextual idiosyncrasies and turned into a universal standard? Such transformation requires work that is both political and cultural. We call this work “standardization.” 1 Such processes of diffusion are generally described as involving adaptation to local circumstance—what Campbell (2004) calls “translation” or Levitt and Merry (2009) term “vernacularization,” for example. These processes merit their own analysis, one that assesses the fate of the “standard model” as it is localized. This article, however, does not seek to produce such an analysis. 2 For a survey of these approaches within the classic literature on social movements, see Strang and Soule (1998). On diffusion and social movements, see Givan, Roberts and Soule (2010). 296 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion The Process of Standardization As we have seen, the existing literature focuses almost exclusively on the adopters. Surprisingly, little is said about how the ideas, practices, or innovations being transferred are actually identified and selected in the first place by those engaged in the promotion of a model. We suggest, therefore, treating standardization as a process by which a practice in a particular setting is taken up by policymakers, NGOs, IOs, or other actors and reconfigured to make it usable in other settings as a sort of “standard model” or template. The creation of such a template often involves ridding the original of local particularities and replacing them with broadly acceptable norms and practices. This adaptation of the original involves a process of reinterpretation and repackaging, the construction of an agreed-upon practice or norm which facilitates coordination and cooperation among the actors in a given network (Grewal 2008:21–22). Often, ideas thereby become quite generic. In the process, they also become the standard by which the practices of adopters will be subsequently evaluated. Of course, such a process has not been completely ignored, particularly by those working on the sociology of organizations (on theorization, for example, see Strang and Meyer 1993:492). Similarly, in his study of the transfer of management techniques from Japan, Lillrank (1995) remarks that the first step of any transnational transfer is the translation of concrete local practices into abstractions for export; this action is similar to what we call standardization. He notes that this step is difficult to achieve because the abstracted technique or practice has to be thin enough to travel and yet thick enough to implement and potentially produce similar effects. Abstraction is unreliable because it tends to leave out the tacit knowledge and know-how accumulated through rounds of trial-and-error, and cannot include the complementarities that may make the technique or practice efficient in the home country (Lillrank 1995:976). Such studies of organizational diffusion touch on parts of the process of standardization and highlight its cultural dimension. But they neglect the extent to which it also has political implications. There are always multiple candidates for standardization within a given organization or network. The standardization and promotion of one set of ideas or practices over another is not the expression of its superiority, but the result of a political process in which some actors gain the authority to speak in the name of the standard model. Other actors and their practices are sidelined. Because standardization involves politics, it is necessary to pay attention to the actors involved and to their capacity to exercise influence. Here, again the sociology of organizations has much to say. The process is akin to that described by Fligstein (1996:659), whereby winners of intra-organizational struggles can consolidate their status inside a given organization or network insofar as it allows them to define, analyze, and solve problems on their own terms. In this respect, the sociology of organizations is close to the social movement and policy literatures that speak to the politics of such processes by highlighting the roles of advocacy networks and policy entrepreneurs. Even if we can extrapolate from the analyses of the transnational transfer of standard models already developed, analytic gaps remain. Here, the literature on mechanisms—conceptualized by social movement scholars to make sense of contentious dynamics in different settings—is particularly helpful (McAdam et al. 2001; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2008). The next section builds on both social movement and public policy literatures to unpack the process of standardization and identify the different mechanisms that might constitute it. Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 297 From Process to Mechanisms: Unpacking Standardization Although there are a number of different ways of defining “mechanism,” we rely on Gerring’s (2007a:166) consensual definition, according to which a mechanism is “the causal pathway or process leading from X1 to Y.” Mechanisms are distinct from variables (even intermediary ones) in that they do not derive their effect from changes in their value, but from their presence (or absence) in combination with other mechanisms.3 Therefore, analyzing mechanisms implies going beyond correlation analysis to look at relational patterns and configurations over time (Mahoney 2001). As such, this approach is aligned more with the longstanding traditions of historical sociology and historical institutionalism in comparative politics than with its statistical and formal versions. The reliance on mechanisms and configuration rather than variables and correlation for identifying causal pathways suggests, among other things, that the outcomes analyzed result from action (and therefore actors) rather than the “amount” of something, as studies based on the correlation of variables imply. We thus use action verbs such as certifying, framing, and so on to name mechanisms; such formulations suggest both agency and dynamism. If mechanisms involve configurations of particular actions carried out by particular actors in particular settings at particular times, it follows that the outcome of interest will not be the product of mechanisms alone, but rather of their interaction within the specific context in which they take place (Falleti and Lynch 2009). Despite this emphasis on specificity, however, it is only of interest to use the notion of mechanisms if their identification can be more than idiographic. To have explanatory leverage, they should be general enough concepts to apply to several situations and settings, as McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly argue (McAdam et al. 2001, 2008). This is why, in our selection of cases, we chose to draw on two subfields that rarely “speak” to each other: the social movement and public policy literatures. If one considers the entire process of transnational transfer, standardization can be defined as a constitutive mechanism of the initial stage of the whole process, the chain linking the originators to the actors engaged in proposing and popularizing a standard model. However, as Tilly and Tarrow (2007:214) remind us, “the distinction between mechanisms and processes … depends on our level of observation. We can always look inside any particular mechanism and find smaller-scale mechanisms at work.” Similarly, Falleti and Lynch (2008:334) remark that “mechanisms are the building blocks or constituent components of processes.” Therefore, we isolate this initial part of the transfer process that involves standardization and we treat it as a process, itself composed of several mechanisms. We do not argue that these mechanisms occur in sequence; they may well overlap. And finally, they may be the product of the action of a variety of actors: local, national, international, or transnational. Based on the cases discussed in this paper, we inductively identify three mechanisms present in the process of standardization: certification, decontextualization, and framing. According to Tilly and Tarrow (2007:75; emphasis added), “certification occurs when a recognized external authority signals its readiness to recognize and support the existence and claims of a political actor … [It] changes both the new actor’s strategic position and its relation to other actors that could become its oppressors, rivals or allies.” Certification supposes that someone has the power to certify other actors. It refers both to the existence of 3 Staggenborg (2008:342) makes an interesting point when she argues that a language of “measuring” mechanisms (McAdam et al. 2008) is potentially problematic because “there is a danger of treating mechanisms like variables rather than as dynamic events affecting relationships within particular contexts.” 298 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion hierarchies and power relations within institutional arenas, and to the legitimation of an actor that thereby gains a new authority and capacity to exercise influence. But certification can also refer to the newly acquired legitimacy of a particular set of practices. As we will show in our two case studies, particular practices were certified by particular actors that had themselves been certified by external authorities. The certifier of practices has to be certified itself to be able to exercise influence. Decontextualization involves a deliberate effort to disembed a given practice, idea set, or institution from its social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts by turning it into a relatively thin abstract model with modular properties. It involves “writing out” what policy or institutional entrepreneurs perceive to be an obstacle to transfer. However, as organizational sociologists remind us, this disembedding cannot be too drastic. It is important to retain some link to the context where the practice succeeded, such as the highly productive Japanese factories Lillrank (1995) studied 40 years ago. Our two cases, South Africa for TRCs and Brazil for CCTs, could be constantly referenced as success stories. The official genealogy of the standard can thus be used strategically. Part of this reference to history involves framing. This refers to the strategic discursive work carried out by actors as they define situations and problems, simplify events and experiences, connect distinct issues, and suggest general solutions, for collective action purposes. It can involve “folding” key issues into others so as to make them more acceptable and thus rally the support of allies. Such work facilitates the extension of the original frame so as to encompass the values and interests of potential supporters (Snow, Rochford, Worden, and Benford 1986). Although some authors contend that mechanisms are unobservable (Mahoney 2001:581), we follow McAdam et al. (2008:308), as well as Falleti and Lynch (2008:333), who argue that the presence or absence of mechanisms can be assessed directly or indirectly. To make our case, we document how three mechanisms, constitutive of the larger mechanism of standardization (here treated as a process), are observable in domains as varied as those of transnational social movement organizations and social policy innovation. Our research strategy, and the order of exposition in this article, was to first inductively derive the three mechanisms from the case of TRCs, and then to ask whether they could also be applied to another realm: CCTs. Our account thus builds on a process-tracing strategy of causal inference. This strategy involves tracing how initial conditions translate into outcomes, and unpacking this process into a series of steps (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007b). Our data are drawn from the abundant literature, academic, and other, which exists on these two cases. It is an analysis that relies on a careful reading of their histories, their presentation in publications and Web sites by the actors involved in certification, decontextualization and framing, and, finally, the numerous analyses by observers and scholars. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: The Standardization of Truth Telling The issues of transitional justice emerged gradually in the 1980s as Latin American dictatorships ended and the human rights community began asking how to deal with past crimes and human rights violations. A truth commission has four characteristics: it focuses on the past in general rather than on a specific event; it paints a wide-ranging portrait of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law; it is most often a temporary institution that ends with the submission of a report; it is always “vested with some sort of authority, by way of its sponsor, that allows it greater access to information, greater security or Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 299 protection to dig into sensitive issues, and a greater impact with its report” (Hayner 1994:604). Fifteen such commissions existed over the two decades from 1974 to 1994. However, only one of these—named by the post-transition president of Chile, Patricio Aylwin, on March 11, 1990—was presented as seeking “reconciliation” (VanAntwerpen 2008:30). The mandate of the others was limited to uncovering the “truth” about abuse and violence. Given the international attention that had been drawn to Chile by, first, the election of a socialist president in 1970, and then the extraordinarily harsh years of dictatorship, it seemed inevitable that its TRC would also receive international attention (Zalaquett 1993:14, 11, and passim). It lost its leading position, however, when the South African TRC was established in 1995. Proponents and critics alike see these commissions as truth-seeking and potentially justice-seeking institutions, substituting for the more familiar resort to the formal legal system in accordance with the model derived from the N€ urnberg Trials after World War II. Considering their limited, if any, legal authority, their actual aim is generally peace rather than justice in a legal sense (Teitel 2003:79). As a result, the central actors are firmly anchored in civil society rather than the state: NGOs, human rights groups, and churches are centerfield and rely primarily on moral rather than purely political authority. Some scholars claim that there is a “… fairly settled consensus … that there can be no lasting peace without some kind of accounting and that truth and justice are complementary approaches to dealing with the past. The question today is not whether something should be done after atrocity but how it should be done” (Nagy 2008:276). A huge literature now exists within the human rights community about the normative as well as psycho-social propositions underlying the establishment of such commissions (Vinjamuri and Snyder 2004; Nobles 2010). Debates continue to be lively, but they are not our focus here. Rather, we are interested in the ways in which an international “transitional justice community,” composed of academics and practitioners in NGOs and elsewhere, has coalesced and has been promoting a model drawing on the South African experience. “In the aftermath of the South African commission, the language of reconciliation has proliferated widely, and the TRC has repeatedly been touted as an innovative ‘model’ … There has been noteworthy emulation on the part of practitioners of ‘transitional justice’ operating in other national locations, and perhaps even more international attention from a legion of academics, journalists, and transnational activists” (VanAntwerpen 2009:96). The standard-setting South African TRC thus “looms large in the transitional landscape as a model or lesson” (Nagy 2008:279). It is the consolidation of this standard model, and the cultural and political work of activists and entrepreneurs in the transitional justice community that interest us here. The three mechanisms identified above can be observed in their actions. Identifying the Standard-Bearer The certification of practices and actors is a key mechanism in the standardization of Truth Commissions. Several individuals and organizations might have become the promoters of TRCs, but the Ford Foundation and also the Aspen Institute invested resources in selecting the key players, thereby engaging in certification. Starting in the late 1980s, the Ford Foundation funded conferences on transitional justice that brought together an experienced and renowned international group of human rights activists, lawyers, and academics (Dezalay 2008; Arthur 2009). These conferences compared national experiences. According to Paige Arthur, the first conference—organized by Alice Henkin, director of the Justice and 300 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion Society Program at the Aspen Institute, and supported by a $47,380 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1988—represented a turning point in that “it offered an ‘intellectual framework’ that was previously absent for discussing issues that were raised in postwar Germany, Spain, Greece, Argentina, and other places” (Arthur 2009:327, 349). These conferences attracted human rights practitioners and activists, not only because they addressed concrete dilemmas and pressing issues, but also because they gave a new purpose to the human rights community in the wake of the end of dictatorships in Latin America and South Africa (Arthur 2009:335). Beyond the denunciation of human rights violations, reconciliation, peacebuilding, and prevention became actionable. Ideas, practices, and standards do not float freely, and their carriers do not emerge spontaneously. The Ford Foundation certified ideas and practices, and also particular individuals and organizations. In so doing, it enhanced their international status and authority and thereby directly contributed to shaping the structure and content of transnational human right networks. The numerous conferences’ overlapping participants were becoming key players in the international human rights community and would often go on to head either truth commissions themselves and/or NGOs dedicated to transitional justice. Several organizations, some of them generously funded by the Ford Foundation, emerged out of these conferences or in parallel. In 1989, the Ford Foundation funded the creation of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa; this center was created and managed by the South African lawyer-activist Paul van Zyl, who would become the Executive Secretary of the South African TRC in 1995 and Vice-President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in 2001 (Dezalay 2008:77). In 1992, participants in the Charter 77 Foundation conference on “Justice in Times of Transition” created an organization called Project on Justice in Times of Transition. Alex Boraine, who would become Deputy Chair of the South African TRC in 1995, and founder and president of the ICTJ in 2001, collaborated with the Project, and even borrowed its name to create his own organization in South Africa in 1994: Justice in Transition in South Africa (Arthur 2009:329). All these organizations increased the visibility and legitimacy of ideas and practices associated with truth commissions and transitional justice. The establishment of South Africa’s TRC in 1995 was a turning point. This truth commission not only built on previous experience and conferences but also recruited most of its leadership and staff from two South African organizations associated with these conferences and the Ford Foundation. The euphoria of post-apartheid democracy and the international hopes for a successful transition guaranteed that South Africa’s TRC would be studied. South Africans were fully aware and not always pleased with this research attention, thereby leading to at least somewhat cynical appreciations, but ones that also testify to the extent to which it was becoming “the” model: “In the late 1990s [the South African poet] Antjie Krog had complained publicly about the dozens of scholars that were flooding South Africa to study the TRC, providing material for the stereotypical image of the jet-setting international academic who flew in for a few days of TRC hearings, a visit with Archbishop Tutu, and a trip to Kruger National Park” (VanAntwerpen 2008:27). Even more telling is the speed with which the example of the TRC was absorbed into scholarly debates. Only a year after it was created, South Africa’s TRC was already being debated and assessed at a roundtable organized by the World Peace Foundation and Harvard Law School; numerous similar forums followed. After the TRC report was issued, all its principal actors engaged in significant amounts of international travel at the behest of those who wanted to hear about the “lessons it might afford” (VanAntwerpen 2008:27). Two major standardization and export centers have grown out of the South African TRC. One is the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR), created in Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 301 2000 by activists involved in the South African TRC, and located in Cape Town. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the former Chair of the South African TRC, was named patron and contributed to certifying it. One of its major initiatives is the Transitional Justice in Africa Programme, which works in three regions: Southern Africa, Central and East Africa, and the Greater Horn of Africa. It has also been invited to partner projects in numerous countries, including South Sudan, Uganda, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Efforts to disseminate a standard model are a key part of this program.4 The second organization emerging from the South African TRC, the ICTJ, deserves more attention. Because of its size, reach, resources, and ambition, it has become the central actor in the standardization of TRCs. Once again, the Ford Foundation played an instrumental role. A 2000 meeting, convened by the Foundation, brought together a small group of legal scholars, human rights activists, and practitioners. The day after the conference, the president of the Ford Foundation called Alex Boraine, who had participated in the conference, and offered to support the creation of a new organization dedicated to transitional justice (ICTJ 2007:4). Two of the ICTJ’s founders were former participants in the South African TRC. Alex Boraine, ICTJ President until 2004, was Deputy Chair of the TRC, serving Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu until 1998,5 and Paul van Zyl, ICTJ Vice-President, was Executive Secretary of the TRC from 1995 to 1998. The third co-founder, Priscilla Hayner, was an expert in truth commissions around the world and had been a consultant to the Ford Foundation and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her participation consolidated ties with the Ford Foundation and opened possibilities for collaboration with the United Nations. The ICTJ quickly became a hub of expertise at the center of the standardization of truth commissions thanks not only to the high profile of its founders but also to the certification that the enthusiastic support of the Ford Foundation represented. The latter initially committed $4 million for a period of 5 years, which is significantly above the average grants it generally gives to NGOs (Dezalay 2008:78). Other leading human rights organizations were not enthusiastic about this innovation. Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the main international human rights organizations along with Amnesty International, was concerned that the ICTJ would invade its turf; it also received funding from the Ford Foundation and considered that it deserved this money because it could very well take care of transitional justice issues (Dezalay 2008:78). However, HRW eventually accepted the new division of labor imposed on it. Certification thus involves sidelining competitors and consolidating a niche. In order to differentiate itself from its competitors in the human rights community, the ICTJ focused on transitional justice and developed an expertise that would go beyond field reports and serve as a basis for consulting work. The ICTJ, as well as the much smaller sister institute in Cape Town, IJR, puts a strong accent on research as a tool for action. As it presents itself: ICTJ assists societies confronting massive human rights abuses to promote accountability, pursue truth, provide reparations, and build trustworthy institutions. Committed to the vindication of victims’ rights and the promotion of gender justice, we provide expert technical advice, policy analysis, and comparative research on transitional justice approaches, including criminal prosecutions, reparations initiatives, truth seeking and memory, and institutional reform.6 4 See http://ijr.org.za/programmes.php (accessed November 9, 2012). Because our focus is not, as stated in the Introduction, to assess the diffusion—successful or not—of the standard model, we make no effort here to trace the cases in which the standard TRC model has been taken up at the suggestion or behest of these organizations. 5 See ICTJ http://www.ictj.org/about/alex-boraine (accessed November 9, 2012). 6 See http://www.ictj.org/about/vision-and-mission (accessed November 9, 2012). 302 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion The ICTJ also portrays itself as providing services to many countries all over the world. Its Web site provides a map, generated by the organization to represent its international reach, reflecting the goal of the ICTJ to be the “go to” agency whenever a TRC is under discussion.7 The ICTJ was not only supported by other foundations and governmental agencies from several countries. Its annual reports show that in addition to the Ford Foundation, from the outset it received support from four major American foundations: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Andrus Family Fund. Later, it received additional support from the Belgian, British, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish governments, as well as the European Commission, several development agencies (such as the Austrian Development Cooperation, the Canadian International Development Agency, Irish Aid, and Japan International Cooperation Agency), and the United Nations (UNDP and UN Office for Project Services).8 Furthermore, in 2003, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested the ICTJ to host a seminar on transnational justice for the top UN management, and in 2004, the ICTJ was invited to address the UN Security Council. Such certification significantly improved the ICTJ’s strategic position in the international human rights community and made it a central interlocutor for all governments interested in setting up a truth commission to address past human rights violations. The ICTJ even claims to be the guardian of “real” truth commissions and mounted campaigns against countries that deviated from the standard TRC at the expense of victims. As it explained in its 2006–2007 Annual Report: We have also been emphatic about commissions that claim to model themselves on the South African TRC, especially when they make thinly disguised efforts to enshrine impunity under a facade of truth-seeking. We have argued strenuously against this misappropriation, particularly if it robs the victims of their voice. In this effort, the Center has mounted constitutional challenges to problematic draft TRC legislation (in Indonesia, for example), staged global media campaigns against flawed amnesty provisions (in Algeria, for instance), and criticized what we regard as disingenuous efforts (like the defunct TRC in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Joint Indonesian-Timorese “Commission of Truth and Friendship”) (ICTJ 2007:27). Writing Out Religion and Framing Transitional Justice The cultural and political work of organizations such as the ICTJ also reveals two other mechanisms in the process of standardization, both closely linked in this case. As the framing of truth and reconciliation practices goes forward, there has been a significant amount of decontextualization. Jonathan VanAntwerpen (2008, 2009) has analyzed in detail the ways in which the notion of reconciliation had to be framed and then reframed in order to make it useful, not only in different geographical settings but, more importantly, within the human rights and transitional justice movements themselves. The goal was not to adapt the South African TRC model to local realities, but to convince activists of its value as the standard model to diffuse to as many countries as possible. In addition to organizing training seminars and workshops, the ICTJ thus launched a 6-month international fellowship program for human rights activists. However, some human rights and transitional justice activists were uncomfortable with some elements of the concept of reconciliation as developed by the 7 See http://www.ictj.org/our-work (accessed November 9, 2012). ICTJ Annual Reports from 2001 to 2011 are available online at http://ictj.org/reports (accessed November 9, 2012). 8 Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 303 South African TRC, and therefore standardization included efforts to reconcile cultural differences via decontextualization and framing. There had already been doubts about the Chilean insistence on reconciliation rather than punishment (VanAntwerpen 2008:44ff). But skepticism reached a new high as the South African experience unfolded. For the Commission, by linking “notions of confession and forgiveness, cathartic testimony, redeemed suffering, and healing truth, Christian language of ‘reconciliation’ was conjoined with that of ‘human rights’ to produce a distinctive model of transitional justice” (VanAntwerpen 2009:93). Such a perspective is not that surprising when one looks at the composition of the TRC: out of an initial group of 17 commissioners, four came from the senior ranks of the religious community, beginning with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who acted as Chair (Chapman and Ball 2001:18). Similarly, Alex Boraine, Deputy Chair of the TRC and later co-founder of the ICTJ, “served as president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa from 1970 to 1972, having been ordained as a Methodist minister in 1956.”9 This combination, much more clearly articulated by the South African report than, for example, the Chilean one (VanAntwerpen 2009:107), provoked immediate reaction by advocates of conceptualizations of transitional justice that emphasized a judicial approach.10 But it also provoked opposition from supporters of alternative approaches to reconciliation. For example, philosophers Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, beginning with the meeting at the 1996 Harvard Law School mentioned above, launched an assault on this religious grounding. Others harshly rejected Archbishop Tutu’s religiously inspired notions of reconciliation, arguing that it “was the Trojan horse used to smuggle an unpleasant past (that is, impunity) into the present political order, to transform political compromises into transcendental moral principles” (Wilson in VanAntwerpen 2008:122). The decontextualization of South Africa’s TRC thus involved writing out what was a source of conflict: it was secularized, stripped of its deeply religious meanings going back to St. Paul, and turned from “thick” to “thin,” so as to make it more exportable and comfortable for elite practitioners and the liberal and cosmopolitan field of transitional justice (VanAntwerpen 2008:45; 2009:124). Decontextualization allowed multiple definitions of “reconciliation” to coexist. This polysemy “has inhibited the robust operationalization of reconciliation as a working principle of [organizations like the ICTJ]” (VanAntwerpen 2009:113). Nonetheless, polysemy has the advantage of allowing several framing strategies to be combined for making the advocated standard appealing to a wide variety of audiences. In this respect, the mechanisms of decontextualization and framing complemented and fed one another in this process of standardization. While decontextualization necessarily involves reframing, it also widens subsequent framing options. For example, in 2004, Paul van Zyl, Vice-President of the ICTJ, took advantage of the UN’s efforts to outline its own approach to transitional justice issues11 to reframe TRCs as a central, effective element of peacebuilding (van Zyl 2005). In so doing, he also contributed to defining TRCs as a superior standard clearly distinguishable from other types of commissions of investigation: The development of a post-conflict peacebuilding strategy must be based on a rigorous examination of the causes, nature and effect of the prior conflict. Truth commissions are often well-placed to undertake this form of examination … Truth 9 http://www.ictj.org/about/alex-boraine (accessed November 9, 2012). For example, Reed Brody (2001) of HRW published an article in Nation that was critical of the TRC’s approach, which eschewed a judicial approach for what he described as a “feel-good idea.” Indeed, he accused the international human rights movement of being “blindly besotted with truth commissions.” 11 In 2004, the UN Secretary General submitted for the first time a report on transitional justice to the Security Council so as to define the UN’s approach. 10 304 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion commissions also examine the social, structural and institutional causes of conflict and human rights abuse and are able to clarify not only what happened in individual cases but also the broader context which enabled the violations to occur … On this basis they can make more effective and informed recommendations as to measures that can be taken to deal with these root causes or reduce the capacity of disruptive actors to perpetuate conflict. The recommendations can be extraordinarily helpful to those involved in developing and executing post-conflict peacebuilding strategies. (van Zyl 2005:215–216, emphasis added) Such reframing has the potential of allowing the ICTJ to graft its South African-inspired standard to peacebuilding policy packages advocated by the UN and, thereby, further its consolidation.12 Reframing involves folding an increasing number of issues into transitional justice, to the extent that the latter is presented as the main solution to resolving a wide variety of societal conflicts (Dezalay 2008:79). For example, in 2004, the ICTJ launched a new program on transitional justice and gender aimed at “engendering” reparations.13 Another ICTJ top staff member provides an additional instance of reframing, once the standard model has been decontextualized. The research director of the ICTJ, Pablo de Greiff, was initially skeptical of the notion of reconciliation. He reworked the concept of transitional justice, one tool of which is “truth-telling,” to align it with the currently popular approach to development resting on concepts of social capital and trust. With respect to truth commissions more specifically, he calls for expanding their mandate—bringing it closer to what the South African rather than the Chilean Commission did, but also going beyond— in order to “allow them to investigate economic crimes, including corruption, the exploitation of ‘conflict resources,’ and so on” (de Greiff 2009: 37, 36, and passim). In this aspect too, with respect to the mandate of a commission, the South African experience has inspired the standard model more than the Chilean original did, but nonetheless, by calling for even larger mandates, both contexts are left on the sideline and the standard model is the one proposed in situations where a TRC is under consideration, albeit in full recognition that the standard model will then be “re-localized” when adopted in any specific case. Conditional Cash Transfers: Standardization for “Modern Social Policy” Conditional cash transfers as a policy instrument are spreading quickly in the Global South (Bastagli 2009; Lomel
ı 2009). Their use is intended to achieve a “modernization” of social policy; their focus is on providing the extreme poor and poor households with a minimum consumption floor. “Putting cash in the hands of poor people (especially families and women) we are told, is an effective means to use resources to build human capital and prevent the generational transmission of poverty” (St. Clair 2009:177). As such, CCTs are a key policy instrument in the cross-regional spread of the social investment perspective (Jenson 2010). The CCT has been standardized as a relatively thin version of the original policy design, developed during the years of high neoliberalism. The ones now being put into place are more likely to be simply cash transfers, with few conditions really being enforced. Nonetheless, the name CCT continues to be used, and Brazil’s program, the Bolsa Fam
ı lia, provides the model. Conditional cash transfers provide cash to poor households on the condition that parents make what are described as “investments in the human capital of 12 In 2006–2007, the ICTJ made presentations at several meetings of the UN Peacebuilding Commission, “offering suggestions for a framework by which [transitional justice] issues could be prioritized as central to any peacebuilding agenda” (ICTJ 2007:30). 13 See ICTJ (2005:40). Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 305 their children” (Barrientos 2009: 166). Often included as part of this condition are periodic health checkups, growth monitoring and vaccinations for children; antenatal care for mothers; and sometimes, attendance by mothers at health information talks.14 Other conditions usually include school enrollment and attendance, with a specified attendance target (such as 80%). Most CCT programs direct the money to the mother. Conditional cash transfer programs have spread widely. A reliable up-to-date count is not available,15 but one from 2007 listed CCT programs in 16 Latin American countries and 30 around the world (Lomel
ı 2009:167–168). Almost every country in Latin America has a CCT program; there are large-scale programs in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Turkey; and there have been pilot programs in Cambodia, Malawi, Morocco, Pakistan, and South Africa, to name some examples (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:1, 32). Only the very first programs (discussed below) were developed domestically (Handa and Davis 2006:513–516; Teichman 2008:463–464). All the others have been promoted and subsidized by international funders, in particular the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Latin America, and various European foreign aid agencies in Africa. In this wide “community of practice,” there were at first a variety of contenders to achieve the status of standard model. Mexico’s CCT program Progresa/Oportunidades, for example, was an early contender, and it remains the favorite of technical experts, in large part because it was designed with built-in evaluations that underpin an enormous data collection, thus empowering researchers.16 However, Brazil’s Bolsa Fam
ı lia has emerged as the standard model for many countries seeking to reduce poverty. This popularity is attributable to the certification it received in its early stages from more than one international authority, and also to the efforts of the Brazilian government which worked with IOs to promote its own model as appropriate for South–South learning and transfer. Sidelining the Early Risers Because certification involves choice and exclusions, it is sometimes forgotten that CCTs began as experiments developed indigenously by several different countries. At least three Latin American countries—Chile, Mexico, and Brazil— were experimenting with CCTs in the 1980s and 1990s (Teichman 2008:452). All experiments did not achieve the same notoriety, however. Both Chile’s CCT program, which provided individually designed and labor-intensive supports to extremely poor families, and Mexico’s CCT program, which imposed numerous conditions in the name of “co-responsibility,” were sidelined, as were the early Brazilian CCTs intensively focused on human capital. The Bolsa Fam
ı lia, in place since 2003, “… takes a softer, more gradual tack on conditions; and puts a shade more emphasis on redistribution than on human capital formation” (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:6). Chile Solidario was created in 2000, in response to concerns from within the Finance Ministry about expenditure control and fears within the Planning Ministry about welfare dependency. In other words, the Chilean debate was between, on one side, financial authorities within the government and the partisan right 14 Some programs set conditions only for school attendance, whereas others require use of both education and health services (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:5). 15 In part, this is because they are multiplying rapidly, but also because some are quite small pilot projects that are either terminated or generalized. 16 As the World Bank’s research review put it: “What really makes Mexico’s program iconic are the successive waves of data collected to evaluate its impact, the placement of those data in the public domain, and the resulting hundreds of papers and thousands of references that such dissemination has generated” (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:6). 306 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion that preferred a straightforward cash handover and, on the other side, planning officials and poverty experts from left-of-center NGOs calling for additional supports to aid the move out of poverty. Described as the “perfection of targeting,” Chile Solidario imposes 53 conditions and assigns a social worker to each recipient family to provide intensive personalized support for 2 years (Teichman 2008:463–464). Developed early and being the most comprehensive of the three programs, it might have been a model. But “thus far Chile Soldario is a model unto itself …” (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:6). Mexico’s CCT program began in 1997 as Progresa, covering just 300,000 households in poor rural areas. It too was designed locally by government technocrats seeking a solution to the high and stable levels of extreme poverty. According to Maxine Molyneux, no enthusiast of the program, “[t]hough broadly in line with the principles of targeting and co-responsibility developed at the World Bank in the late 1980s and early 1990s, … Progresa was not imposed by the Bank” (Molyneux 2006:443).17 The name was changed to Oportunidades as the coverage was expanded to urban areas and eventually to more than five million households (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:268–269; Soares, Guerreiro Osorio, Veras Soares, Medeiros and Zapeda 2009:212). The Mexican programs enforced extensive conditions; in addition to imposing behaviors around child rearing, recipients of the Mexican benefits were required to contribute a number of hours to work in the community, such as cleaning public spaces. Both of these programs were up and running in 2003 when President Lula of Brazil met with World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn and Santiago Levy, a key promoter of Mexico’s program (Lindert, Linder, Hobbs and de la Brière 2007:13–14). Six months after this meeting, President Lula announced the consolidation of Brazil’s existing CCTs into an integrated program. Here, as with the ICTJ, we see the ways in which certification is sought and fostered by policy entrepreneurs; it is not simply conferred. The ICTJ was willing to work with the certifiers, and so too was President Lula. Of the three countries that experimented early with CCTs, in 2003, Brazil became the most willing to publicly and visibly involve IOs in the design of its new initiative.18 At the same time, while providing technical expertise to Brazilian social policymakers, the representatives of the Bank could also gain intimate knowledge about the program. This was social learning in operation. The involvement of outside experts alongside those of its Ministry of Social Affairs in the design of the Brazilian program also allowed the experts in IOs, particularly the social protection division of the World Bank, both to claim some “ownership” of the Bolsa Fam
ı lia and to widely disseminate information about it. If, however, the World Bank was a “partner” to the Brazilian program from the start, certification of the Brazilian way of doing a CCT does not depend simply on the World Bank or IDB, despite their role in providing investment loans (Handa and Davis 2006:515). Its certification also depends on the tight connections developed with the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG—formerly the International Poverty Centre) of the UN Development Program, located in Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia. This relationship, too, is promoted by the Brazilian government and particularly the Ministry of Social Affairs created during the Lula Administration. 17 Nor does Teichman mention international agencies, except to suggest that support from the international community allowed President Fox to resist calls to dismantle the program coming from numerous groups on both right and left (2008:454). 18 Both Chile and Mexico followed the more usual path for social policymaking of working exclusively with domestic social policy experts and advocates (Teichman 2008:452ff). Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 307 The International Poverty Center was created in 2004 as a partnership between the government of Brazil and the UNDP.19 Justified by the Brazilian government as the proper role for an “emerging global player” to adopt, support for such a partnership also provided an institutional showcase for its social development perspectives, including the Bolsa Fam
ı lia, and its promotion of South–South learning. The IPC-IG has organized numerous study tours to Brasilia for social policymakers from Africa and Asia, as well as for Brazilians, to those regions. In these exchanges, the actors are difficult to pin down, however. While these policy entrepreneurs were frequently Brazilian nationals, sometimes they were working for the International Poverty Centre (and its successor) and sometimes for the Brazilian government, usually the Ministry of Social Development. Certainly, the IPC-IG actively promotes learning about the Bolsa Fam
ı lia. The study tours it organizes almost always include a session on the Bolsa Fam
ı lia. At any one time, the Web site of the UNDP-sponsored Centre is likely to feature one or more Brazilian ministers speaking about policy. This close collaboration results in a certification of Brazil’s approach to CCTs. Nonetheless, the standard model that is presented has itself also been framed and reframed as well as decontextualized. Lightening Up: Writing Out Conditionality As already noted, each of the three early risers who developed CCTs in Latin America adopted a design that relied on recipients fulfilling certain conditions. In Mexico, for example, this was a major selling point for Progresa. As Santiago Levy, often described as the architect of Mexican CCTs, put it: “Poor families need help, but this should not suppress or undermine their role as protagonists in transforming their living conditions” (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:61). Maxine Molyneux (2006:434) describes the same notions more critically: “… the responsible participants (mothers) receive their stipend conditional on fulfilling the duties laid out by the programme managers … Failure to comply with the requirements can lead to being struck off the programme.” There has been a significant decontextualization of this original vision of the CCT as an instrument of neoliberal social policy. This decontextualization away from neoliberalism characterizes Brazil’s Bolsa Fam
ı lia, which was always less justified as a “conditional” program and included an important discourse of social rights. Indeed, the Brazilian policy entrepreneurs originally positioned the newly integrated CCT as a tool for achieving the citizenship promises of the 1988 Constitution to reduce poverty and increase equity (Lindert et al. 2007:9). Faced with political opposition to a straightforward cash transfer, however, the government quickly improvised measures that offered to monitor recipients’ respect of the conditions (Britto 2005:15). There is general agreement—and some criticism—that these measures are more window-dressing than substantial and that achieving such monitoring would be difficult. This approach, which makes the Bolsa Fam
ı lia more like a simple cash transfer, involves significant decontextualizing, away from its original punitive neoliberal approach, and helps ensure its availability as a standard model.20 There are several signs of this mechanism at work. One is the reduced emphasis on “coresponsibility” or shared responsibility within the community of CCT promoters. 19 See http://www.ipc-undp.org/pages/newsite/menu/about/introduction.jsp?active=0 (accessed November 9, 2012). Researchers often move back and forth between Brazilian and UN institutions. 20 As early as 2004, the International Poverty Centre described the debate about the necessity of conditionalities and the difficulties of enforcement. Available at http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCOnePager3.pdf (accessed November 9, 2012). 308 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion The notion of co-responsibility had become simply an historical reference to CCTs’ Latin American origins, and to a discourse that might make a CCT more politically popular on the political left as well as center-right (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:61–62). The roots in neoliberal and Washington-Consensus Latin American politics were downplayed, as the policy instrument was decontextualized to become suitable for addressing problems of poverty around the world. Indeed, the notion of conditionality has recently disappeared in some policy communities. The CCT is now so decontextualized as to become one example among several of a broader category of “cash transfers.” This tendency is evident as donors and others have turned their attention to Africa. Thus, IPC-IG now describes itself as able to transfer knowledge about “cash transfer programs,” and social protection more generally: “The surge of Cash Transfer Programmes in Latin America, such as Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Fam
ı lia in Brazil triggered debates on their potential as well as their limits. IPC-IG produces impressive knowledge products on social protection schemes and conducts a number of evaluations of projects and programmes.”21 The preference for the label “cash transfers” (or sometimes Social Cash Transfers—SCT) over CCTs arises in part from a shift in administrative practices. The original emphasis on accurate and effective targeting is no longer such a key theme. Significantly, lighter administrative practices to establish eligibility are accepted in the international community. CCTs originated in Latin American middle-income countries that could rely on significant state capacities, including modern technologies that support data registries, permit mapping of population concentrations of poor people, and allow means-testing to identify recipients. However, not all countries in the Global South have such capacities. Thus, international actors promoting the CCT model are willing to put a significant amount of water in their wine in order to make it operational, all the while gesturing back to the original context. This example from Cambodia is cited approvingly by policy entrepreneurs promoting CCTs: Because Cambodia has rather less administrative capacity than the middle-income Latin American countries where proxy means-testing originated, it has adapted the general practice of proxy means-testing in a way that makes rigorous but simplified testing viable. The schools that participate in its scholarship program are subject to a prior round of geographic targeting, and applicants complete a proxy means test that is used to allocate scholarships among each selected school’s students. Cambodia’s CESSP program dispenses with the cadre of field worker/social workers who often administer the instrument. Instead, students fill out the program application/proxy means test form in school. Then, the teacher reads the information aloud and the classmates help verify/certify that it is correct. (Fiszbein and Schady 2009:71) Reframing from Aid to Policy: Folding in the State Policy entrepreneurs frame cash transfer programs as a poverty reduction instrument, and recipients of CCTs are presented as responsible actors capable of making choices about their children’s and their own futures (St. Clair 2009:177). Bolsa Fam
ı lia’s association with an active and interventionist Brazilian state underpins this reframing. The transfers are intended to provide families with the resources they need not only to access services (Barrientos 2009:166), but also to make their own consumption choices. In particular, they are often contrasted with earlier forms of social protection and assistance that depended on contributions by workers (social protection) or on social workers closely monitoring behavior. 21 http://www.ipc-undp.org (accessed November 9, 2012). Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 309 There are two key aspects to this framing mechanism. A first is that a standardized CCT program is labeled part of a government’s social policy design, not emergency relief, even if it is financed by international banks or NGOs. This designation as social policy blurs the distinction between national sovereignty and foreign aid, allowing countries subjected to the finger-pointing and shaming in the days of structural adjustment to reclaim some space for national and local governments and their employees. Behind the spread of CCTs, there is a postneoliberal discourse that includes relegitimation of the state and of government agencies, and “CCTs have aided in dismissing the stereotype that giving money to poor people is a waste of resources” (St. Clair 2009:177). This emphasis on an active state’s role in social policy is, no doubt, primarily due to the involvement and engagement of policy entrepreneurs coming from the Brazilian state, led by a leftist president. They contribute two notions to the framing of CCTs: that such a cash transfer is an instrument of social development and that Brazil, a southern state, has learned lessons that can profitably be transferred to other southern states. A second aspect of the framing is the gesture toward “modern social policy.” Being defined as social policy rather than aid, the adoption of a CCT program encourages countries to follow Brazil and sign on to the dominant international discourse of investing in their population, and especially its health and human capital. It also encourages them to improve their administrative machinery. Policy entrepreneurs describe the standard model of a CCT using the language of administrative innovation and better program management. Indeed, “improving knowledge of beneficiaries” is one of the objectives consultants list for CCT programs (Stubbs 2009:175). A registry is sometimes important as much for legitimating the program as for finding potential recipients; it suggests up-to-date administrative techniques. Shaped by these three mechanisms, CCTs continued to evolve and rally supporters. As the post-neoliberal social policy domain took shape, and as several countries tested their place in the world, including by the promotion of South– South cooperation, it made more sense to ally rather than dispute. Given the relatively weak evidence that imposing conditions on recipients and then checking compliance produced good value for money, Brazilian policy analysts quietly let drop the notion of “conditionality,” which had initially aligned CCTs with neoliberals’ emphasis on “making families more responsible” as well as strengthening markets. Instead, their attention turned to whom to target and how to target. Thus, a CCT became very similar to a CT. This strategy, coalescing around the “thin” version of a standard model, allows donors, NGOs, and governments to conference and exchange across a large policy community, thereby building momentum for their advocacy of providing money to the poor. A standard model for southern social policy, relying on the provision of cash rather than in-kind (or no) benefits to extremely poor and poor citizens, has been certified over the last decade. Promoters concur on the objectives: to ensure investments in health and human capital and to improve better access to basic needs. The model builds on contemporary and standard practices of public administration. Finally, it has been successfully and proudly framed by policy entrepreneurs from organizations such as the Banks, and political leaders such as President Lula, as a significant contribution to worldwide social policy analysis coming from the Global South and now available for export northward. Conclusion Our goal has been to show that standardization is a central, initial step in the larger process of transnational transfer. Practices and institutions are not readyto-export; their promotion by transnational entrepreneurs requires, among other 310 Standardization for Transnational Diffusion things, preliminary political-cultural work to make them fit to cross-national borders. The early stages of a process of transfer are too often ignored in a literature focused on policy and norm diffusion, which is most interested in adoption and adaptation in specific settings. These local variations and adaptations are also often the explicit theme articulated by the promoters of a standard model themselves—such as the ICTJ, the World Bank, the IPC-IG, and so on—who often tell a story accenting how their counsel is simply that, with local communities having all the necessary autonomy to make use of it as they wish. Such stories of local variation are of course true. Nonetheless, it seems analytically important to ask how such wisdom and counsel is developed in the first place, how the model is thinned out as well as elaborated in order to make sense and make it fit in a variety of circumstances. Thus, in this article, we have deliberately chosen to focus on, and to present findings about, a little-analyzed step in the long process of diffusion—the identification and then political-cultural work involved in the elaboration of the model. Standardization is not the only important step in the process of transnational transfer but it is nonetheless one that cannot be ignored. In undertaking this analysis, we have also generated an unexpected finding. In contrast to what the diffusion literature might lead us to expect, the key actors in shaping the content of the standards under scrutiny here were neither the innovators nor the early adopters: in the case of TRCs, although there were numerous Truth Commissions, and although Chile in the early 1990s was the innovator here, these innovators and early adopters were surpassed by South Africa, as South Africa-inspired NGOs took the lead in exporting a recast blueprint with universal aspirations. In the case of CCTs, Chile and Mexico were innovators that were displaced, while Brazil’s Bolsa Fam
ı lia was disembedded from its national context and reframed by the International Poverty Centre for Inclusive Growth of the UNDP, Brazilian researchers, the Brazilian government, and the World Bank. These two cases suggest that the “standardizers” are entrepreneurs located at the intersection of a complex mix of state and nonstate networks and that the outcome of their endeavor is generally uncertain. Identifying the constitutive mechanisms of the process of standardization allows us to trace the behavior and work of these promoters and, thereby, the ways in which initial conditions are turned into a given outcome. The fact that we find the same three mechanisms—certification, decontextualizing, and framing—in a range of cases and settings implies that they are potentially robust mechanisms of standardization. The validity of this hypothesis and its potential for generalization would have to be determined, of course, by further case analyses that could shed new light on the process of standardization. References Arthur, Paige. (2009) How ‘Transitions’ Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice. Human Rights Quarterly 31: 321–367. Barrientos, Armando. (2009) Understanding Conditions in Income Transfer Programmes. Global Social Policy 9 (2): 165–167. Bastagli, Francesca. (2009) From Social Safety Net to Social Policy? The Role of Conditional Cash Transfers in Welfare State Development in Latin America. IPC-IG Working Paper 60. Brasilia: International Policy Center for Inclusive Growth. Britto, Tatiana. (2005) Recent Trends in the Development Agenda of Latin America: An Analysis of Conditional Cash Transfers. Paper Presented at the Social Protection for Chronic Poverty Conference, University of Manchester, February 23–24. Available at http://www.sed.man.ac.uk/ research/events/conferences/documents/Social%20Protection%20Papers/Britto.pdf. (Accessed November 9, 2012.) Brody, Reed. (2001) Justice: The First Casualty of Truth? Nation, April 30. Marcos Ancelovici and Jane Jenson 311 Campbell, John. (2004) Institutional Change and Globalization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chapman, Audrey R., and Patrick Ball. (2001) The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala. Human Rights Quarterly 23 (1): 1–43. Dezalay, Sara. (2008) Des droits de l’homme au march
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