Coping with the ambiguities of poverty-alleviation programs and policies: a policy sciences approach

Abstract

The many varieties of ambiguity shape the prospects in lower-income countries to establish viable poverty-alleviation programs, appropriately target the poor, and reduce deprivations of families applying for or participating in such programs. Ambiguity can be both a problem and an asset, potentially serving pro-poor purposes but often manipulable to drain benefits away from the poor. The distinctive functions of the decision process, as outlined in the classic policy sciences framework, are applied to cash transfers, pro-poor price subsidies, guaranteed unconditional employment, affirmative action, and resource access for the poor. The guidance for adapting these programs depends heavily on the appraisal function. This article contributes both the diagnosis of how ambiguity can undermine or contribute to the soundness of the poverty-alleviation program selection processes, and how to address these issues. It also demonstrates the utility of the classic policy sciences framework in identifying an extremely broad range of relevant considerations.

Introduction

The role of ambiguities has seldom been examined in the analysis of state-directed programs for alleviating poverty. Ambiguities can undermine the establishment or conduct of the initiatives; divide pro-poor advocates; and lead to conflict, corruption, poor targeting, and ineffectiveness. Ambiguities can cause the collapse of a poverty-alleviation initiative altogether. Yet, ambiguity may be able to secure a poverty program, if broad enough support can be gained from stakeholders who embrace the program with different expectations. Therefore, champions of poverty alleviation need to understand the impacts of ambiguities in order to offset their potentially negative consequences and to capitalize on their possible advantages.

This article examines ambiguities found in three key tasks related to state-directed poverty alleviation: establishing programs, improving targeting to maximize participation of eligible families and reduce the leakage to the non-poor, and reducing the deprivations caused by the programs. Although ambiguity exists for all programs, it is particularly germane in low-income countries, because of typically weaker intelligence and administrative capabilities.

The broad context of poverty alleviation programs

The focus on the ambiguity of poverty-alleviation programs is situated within five crucial themes related to state-provided welfare. The overarching question is whether state-directed poverty alleviation programs are warranted (Bardhan, 1996), given alternatives such as allocating budget funds to directly productive activity or relying on private philanthropy (Dasgupta & Kanbur, 2011), and the possibility of deprivations of applying and participating in poverty alleviation programs, and potential conflicts arising from contested decisions. Even broader critiques pose poverty alleviation programs, which generally have modest redistributive impact, as an inadequate response to the inequality of capitalist systems, preempting more fundamental economic restructuring (Barrientos, 2004; Fischer, 2018). For Latin America, Riggirozzi (2020, 506) argues that “despite a wide range of cash transfers, subsidies and other social policies, the ‘post-neoliberal’ ideal of welfare did not reshape the political and relational powers of citizens in the ways necessary to redress the structural determinants of poverty and inequality across the region.” The critique is even more acute for cases in which financing poverty alleviation programs comes from natural-resource extraction to the detriment of vulnerable rural populations (Riggirozzi, 2020, 515–516).

Second, if it is presumed that state-directed poverty alleviation programs can result in net benefits, the next level of concern is to select the program design that optimizes the pursuit of what is typically a fairly large set of goals: increasing the effective disposable incomes of the poor, as a component of their overall well-being; improving their long-term capacities for themselves and as contributors to society; reducing multidimensional inequality, to be valued in and of itself and to improve overall social interactions, including preempting societal conflict; and making them more effective citizens.¹ The pursuit of some of these goals may entail trade-offs that are discussed further in this paper as normative ambiguity.

Third, among the poverty alleviation program designs expected to serve some or all of these goals, the next level of concern is the effectiveness and efficiency of alternative design in terms of both goals and impacts on stakeholders, whether poor or not. It is striking that the resources devoted to some of the most prominent poverty alleviation programs, such as the conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil, constitute a rather paltry proportion of the national income.² Even more striking, the resources devoted to China’s enormous Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Program (Dibao) cash transfer program, despite covering well over 100 million people, hover around one percent of GDP (Solinger, 2017). It is not surprising that it is often very difficult to assess the lasting impacts of poverty alleviation programs (Millán et al., 2019), in light of the limited resources that have been allocated.

Fourth, for many varieties of poverty alleviation programs, a central concern is the inaccuracy of selection: are the eligible excluded; are the ineligible included? This question of targeting takes up a major portion of this paper. A subsidiary concern is whether it would be a significant problem that some formally ineligible people do participate. For other programs, open eligibility makes this concern irrelevant.

Fifth, yet another concern is the risk that applying to or participating in state directed poverty alleviation programs will be stigmatizing for the poor. Even aside from the psychological distress and possible marginalization of being stigmatized as poor, the prospects of self-stigma or social stigma may deter applying for poverty alleviation programs, thereby reducing the uptake among eligible people.³

The very broad range of poverty alleviation programs can be conceived as falling within four basic types of benefits targeting people regarded as poor. The most prominent benefits are transfers of assets, currently highlighting cash transfers but also including transfers of physical assets such as land. A second prevalent benefit category is savings on expenditures, whether goods or services. A third category encompasses benefits in the form of state-created access advantages (e.g., guaranteed employment, access to natural resources, or affirmative action advantages for higher education or government jobs). Finally, benefits may entail services intended to improve human capital, such as resources and requirements for the poor to avail themselves of these resources.

The stakes

Is ambiguity associated with poverty-alleviation initiatives important enough to be of substantial concern? Consider who qualifies for a program’s benefits. Ambiguous qualification criteria permit extremely high leakages of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, at various times exceeding half of all beneficiaries. Kidd and Athias (2019) provide estimates of inclusion errors (proportion of beneficiaries who are not formally eligible) for nine countries, as displayed in Table 1. Regardless of varying estimates,⁴ the magnitude of the inclusion errors is striking.

Table 1 Inclusion Errors of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs

Ambiguous procedures for estimating whether particular families qualify for poverty assistance often makes programs unnecessarily costly. Ambiguous criteria can cause true or perceived unfairness. At the extreme, the ambiguity of who ought to qualify can stoke violence, as those who are denied benefits believe that they were cheated. Indonesia has experienced considerable violence over eligibility decisions for cash transfer programs.⁵ In the early 1990s, ambiguity in the ethnicity- or caste-based eligibility extended India’s affirmative action “reservation” system to millions of wealthy people and greatly exacerbated caste politics. Singh (1992, 309) argued: “Reservation policy according to caste equations is fast becoming India's most serious dilemma next to religious communalism.” In Brazil, the ambiguity in defining Afro-Brazilian status for the purposes of affirmative action has polarized Afro-Brazilians.

For involuntary displacement, ambiguity in setting compensation causes grievous hardships for millions. Even the ostensibly supportive doctrine of leaving displaced families “no worse off” falters on the ambiguity of valuing losses. People fleeing violence often are denied state support if officials interpret the motive as simple desire for a better life. The practical challenge, then, is to manage ambiguity’s impacts on beneficiary targeting, the interpretations of how the programs ought to be enacted, and how the program impacts ought to be assessed and possibly modified. The underlying analytical challenge is to identify and organize the multiple facets of ambiguity and how they impact poverty-alleviation initiatives.

A core construct underlies the range of concepts usefully regarded as aspects of ambiguity. Risberg and Just (2015, 221) provide a generic definition: “If a situation, practice, or utterance is ambiguous, it does not have a single specified meaning, but is open to various interpretations.” However, this anchor for the constructs obviously requires more elaboration.

Ambiguity can be objective or subjective. It can exist as an objective circumstance of unknown weights of causal factors or contradictory laws, regulations, or program protocols. Because laws, regulations, policies, and programs cannot be specified in such detail to cover every contingency, the flexibility needed to address these contingencies contributes to ambiguity. Decisionmakers may take advantage of objective ambiguity; granting or denying benefits if some criteria call for granting eligibility but others do not. The subjectivity is the perception of these objective ambiguities, including the uncertainty based on the ambiguity.⁶

However, although uncertainty often arises because of ambiguity, it is not useful to consider them as the same, nor that cases of ambiguity are a subset of uncertainty. Some decision literature defines ambiguity as uncertainty about future outcomes,⁷ and predictive ambiguity is an important aspect of uncertainty. Yet the limitation of defining ambiguity as uncertainty is that sometimes ambiguity is deployed with total certainty. An administrator intent on favoring the next relative or coreligionist who applies for welfare can, with certainty, opt for an interpretation of the eligibility criteria that grants eligibility to that applicant. And it may be that all other actors are also certain that the ambiguity in the criteria will result in that administrator favoring this type of applicant. Nevertheless, ambiguity might leave some actors uncertain about outcomes; they might be uncertain about the choice that the administrator may make; and they might be uncertain about the outcomes of initiatives if different choices are made in the future. Thus, there may be uncertainty about which choices conceivably could be made, but additional information held by the decisionmaker regarding his or her goals, or by others with knowledge of these goals, can be fully certain.

These considerations reinforce the relevance of the definition “prone to more than one interpretation” in the context of poverty-alleviation programs. Program proposals cannot specify all program details; impacts cannot be fully certain. Fuzziness of boundary conditions is pervasive. Every policy challenge faces ambiguity of prioritizing the values involved. The question for pro-poor advocates is how ambiguity can be decreased, increased, redefined, or otherwise managed in the pursuit of poverty alleviation.

For some actors, ambiguity is a resource. Ambiguity can be purposive in promoting programs insofar as ambiguous mandates can blur different preferences and expectations that, if made explicit, would undermine a poverty-alleviation initiative. Ambiguity may be a political asset for leaders if more stakeholders believe they would be favored. Yet, ambiguity also may provide administrators the leeway to pursue their preferences if consistent with a plausible interpretation. This may improve the program by reasonable criteria, but may lead to favoritism.

However, ambiguity is often unwelcomed. It can be painful for implementers criticized by leaders who disagree with the implementers’ interpretations. Ambiguous eligibility criteria create a dilemma for administrators torn between “professional” impartiality and traditional norms of favoring the in-group. It is unfair to regard favoritism as normatively bankrupt when traditional norms are compelling (Riggs, 1964), even if this violates the programs’ intent.

The article is organized in seven more sections. Section 2 introduces the multiple varieties of ambiguity. Section 3 outlines the decision functions of the policy sciences framework as they relate to poverty-alleviation policies and programs. Section 4 examines the ambiguities that enable or undermine the establishment of state poverty-alleviation programs. Section 5 covers how ambiguity can undermine benefit targeting. Section 6 addresses how jurisdictional ambiguity weakens poverty-alleviation programs. Section 7 explores approaches to reduce deprivations worsened by ambiguity. Section 8 summarizes the implications for designing, promoting, and conducting poverty-alleviation programs.

Varieties of ambiguity

Although having an overarching concept of ambiguity is analytically reassuring, finer distinctions are necessary to identify diverse impacts. Four broad categories are: (1) normative ambiguity; (2) analytic ambiguity; (3) prescription ambiguity; and (4) jurisdictional ambiguity, several with subcategories. These are displayed in Table 2.

Table 2 Varieties of ambiguity

Normative (or “axiological⁸) ambiguity entails conflict among two or more principles, value judgments, or goals. Some normative principles, such as “All deserve a minimum income”, may serve as informal prescriptions interpreted in different ways and serve as rationales for more specific prescriptions. Yet, it is the ambiguity of specific prescriptions that opens up alternative outcomes of poverty-alleviation programs. For example, China’s central government designed the Dibao poverty program to optimize the targeting to the poorest, but local authorities deviate from this mandate to address social harmony (Li & Walker, 2021). Sandberg (2016, 324) argues that the Uruguayan conditional cash transfer program has an internal ambiguity in the goal of promoting secondary school retention, but entails automatic exit when adolescents age out, do not comply to the conditionality of sufficient attendance, or the family income exceeds the designated poverty level. Reserving the resources allocated to the program for the poor conflicts with the school retention objective.

Normative ambiguity can exist on both the individual and the group level. For the individual, holding conflicting principles or goals is subjectively experienced as ambivalence. In some cases, individual normative ambiguity involves mutually exclusive norms, such as supporting “right to life” and a woman’s right to control her own body. Normative ambiguity also arises from resource limits that constrain actions to achieve multiple goals.

On the group level, when individuals try to act in concert to achieve broadly defined goals, the differences in priorities lurking beneath the apparent unity are often crucial constraints on collective action. Yet, the ambiguity of which goals will ultimately be pursued may be able to keep the group working together.

Normative ambiguity can be manifested by conflicting criteria of assessing outcomes. Virtually all program evaluations are open to multiple plausible criteria—what outcomes, for whom, over what timeframe, ought to be considered? Normative ambiguity can also pertain to roles: conflicting principles and obligations in the conduct of formal roles (e.g., government administrator) or informal roles (e.g., fellow citizen, neighbor). For example, if poverty program administrators may see their role as enforcing eligibility, as opposed to uplifting the poor more generally defined. Formal eligibility criteria cannot fully eliminate alternative role conceptions for administrators who have to judge degrees of compliance.

Analytic Ambiguity encompasses lack of clarity about empirical circumstances and understandings, divided into factual and causal ambiguities.

Factual ambiguity applies to uncertainty about past and current circumstances, data, and so on. Fundamental differences in selection and measurement often give rise to intense debate. Credible sources often provide conflicting intelligence; focusing on different trends and metrics can lead to different assessments.

Causal ambiguity applies to the state of knowledge of the operation and weight of past or present conditioning factors. All predictive probability ambiguity exists if the probabilities associated with causal mechanisms generating future outcomes are unknown. Decision theorists distinguish between uncertainty reflecting known probabilities (risk) and ambiguity as uncertainty about the probabilities of outcomes (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986; Ellsberg, 1962).⁹ Even with consensus on relevant conditioning factors, disagreement often exists on each factor’s strength, leading to different expectations according to the weights given to each. This ambiguity is heightened by uncertainty as to the responsibility of several causes to account for outcomes that already occurred, hampering accountability and adapting policies if the causes of poor policies cannot be identified especially if the impacts of prior or other current policies and the impacts of exogenous shocks are all confounding factors. Uncertainty as to the impact of alternative (i.e., counterfactual) policies, ranging from fairly modest variations to radically different approaches, limits the judgment of the relative effectiveness of alternatives.

Prescription ambiguity

The ambiguity of laws, regulations, and other rules, if their implementation is open to different interpretation, can lead to wide disparities in actions and rationales. Interpretive ambiguity is the most basic source of leeway when a prescription is open to multiple interpretations. Actions backed by particular interpretations can be challenged, yet relatively broad prescriptions permit a greater range of defensible interpretations.

Reinforcing the ambiguity of interpretation is the uncertainty of the intentions of authoritative prescribers. This often provides substantial leeway to those assigned to carry out the prescription, in terms of timing, rigor of application, personnel, etc. This ambiguity is heightened when there are multiple prescribers, as in a legislature. Implementers may presume that prescribers did not intend to have the program implemented, if it seems to be marked by inadequate budgeting, under-staffing, unnecessarily complicated processes, and so on. Implementers may curtail their efforts if they believe that the program is of low priority to government leaders.

Prescription ambiguity is exacerbated when two or more prescriptions call for opposing actions. This may rest on the inconsistency of laws and regulations, formulated at different times by government leaders with different goals, or by different agencies with different mandates. Another prescription ambiguity is the absence of specificity on resource allocation if resources are scarce. Without further guidance in the prescription implementers may have great latitude to determine which potential beneficiaries will receive benefits. China’s Dibao does not have enough resources to provide benefits for all qualified families (Distelhorst & Hou, 2014); nor does Mexico’s huge CCT program Prospera (Crucifix & Morvant-Roux, 2018, 85). Thus, administrators have flexibility in selecting recipients.

Another prescription ambiguity rests on whether achieving the goals of the prescription is feasible in terms of the specified resources, time frame, administrative capacity, and so on. Ambiguity about the capacity to implement is central to the question of whether the program, perhaps with more resources and modifications still in keeping with its major thrust, ought to be continued. These ambiguities are rooted in both ex-post ambiguity (could implementation have gone better?) and predictive ambiguity (could implementation now go better with modifications?).

Categorical ambiguity, a crucial uncertainty for several types of poverty-reduction programs, exists when alternative criteria could be applied to determine whether applicants fit within a particular treatment category. Categorical ambiguity complicates decisions as to whether specific individuals qualify for affirmative action benefits if the categories themselves are fuzzy (e.g., race, ethnicity, indigeneity). Categorical ambiguity also can impact geographic targeting regarding potential arbitrariness in the boundaries of eligible areas. Even the category of “poor” is ambiguous, with disagreements over threshold levels of income, or the weights of different components of multi-dimensional poverty measures. Huyen (2003, 23) notes for Vietnam: “Poverty assessment is quite complicated because of poverty multidimensionality and ambiguity of criteria for poverty definition.”

Procedural ambiguity exists when multiple plausible paths of implementation are available. These may involve different sequencing, agencies, timetables, and so on. The prescription may not be specific about which elements of the policy or program ought to be enacted at what pace and for whom, another manifestation of the ambiguity of allocating resources. Discretion over the sequencing of availability to different beneficiaries has an obvious potential to serve favoritism.

Jurisdictional ambiguity exists in the overall administrative structure involving several agencies across a broad range of policies and programs. The entities may be at different levels of government (national, state/province, county/district, etc.), or among agencies at the same level, or even within the same agency, as different units vie for resources and authority.

The forms of ambiguity can be tightly inter-woven. Ambiguity with respect to causes of current conditions and the impacts of alternatives often generates disagreement about appraisal, adding to the ambivalence of policymakers’ and stakeholders’ causal interpretations and divergent policy preferences, thus permitting contending advocates to plausibly present very different promotional appeals, which in turn can raise the level of appraisal skepticism. Appraisal skepticism may generate disagreement as to whether a program ought to be terminated, extended, or modified. Normative ambiguity increases all of the ambiguities that complicate appraisal, and also underlies categorical ambiguity, insofar as different normative principles call for defining categories differently.

Organizing via the decision functions

The different manifestations of ambiguity have intricate interactions with the decision processes that create, block, or shape poverty-alleviation programs. The policy sciences framework offers a systematic examination of risks and opportunities that ambiguity presents. Of the various schema of policy-process functions, the classic seven-function framework (Lasswell, 1971; Lasswell & Kaplan, 1950) is extremely useful, if, as intended, it is not misconstrued as sequential stages.

The intelligence function encompasses gathering, processing, and disseminating of information relevant to decision (Lasswell & McDougal, 1992, 411), including development of theory (“conditioning factors”), planning, and the invention of alternatives. Ambiguity of prediction pertains if the probabilities of outcomes are unknown for a huge range of policy outcomes.

Key to the intelligence function is problem definition, not simply a set of problems, but rather priorities of the intelligence function, the alternative policies and programs to be considered, and the formulation of enactment strategies. Problem definitions often differ across different actors because of the ambiguity regarding time scales and value priorities, as well as to the feasibility of goals. Overly simplified problem definitions often arise from avoidance of the difficulties of recognizing and coping with ambiguity. Scott (1998, 87–88) argues that state operations are prone to simplifying complex reality in order to take decisive action.

The promotion function entails “[t]he active advocacy of policy alternatives, adding intensity of demand to expectations; the taking of initiative to secure the making of prescriptions” (Lasswell & McDougal, 1992, 411). Advocates of particular policies often try to take advantage of the ambiguity of past and projected policy impacts to gain more support.

The prescription function¹⁰ of selecting a concrete poverty-alleviation program design, with some specificity regarding resources, institutions, actions, and targets, typically entails significant ambiguity. Some ambiguity is often built into prescriptions in recognition that needs and wants, and specific obstacles to implantation, may call for different treatments, in some cases to reduce the risks of conflict. Knowledge about particular cases may be lacking, and borderline cases may exist. These may be healthy rationales, but ambiguity may also be built in to evade accountability, exercise power through selective application, or facilitate corruption.

Invocation, the process of determining which prescription ought to be selected for a particular case, may be conducted by the original prescribing body, particularly if the ambiguity becomes highly publicized, yet the courts and implementers are often involved. These decisions, if serving as precedents, amount to de facto prescriptions. Invocation challenges are central to the ambiguities of poverty alleviation initiatives: adopting an interpretation of relevant laws or regulations, or selecting among options of equal formal legal standing,

Application, the concrete actions triggered by invoking a prescription, faces ambiguities from overlapping jurisdictions and limited resources to undertake the responsibilities.

Appraisal, the function and product of evaluating existing policies or programs and explaining outcomes, feeds directly back into the intelligence and promotion functions. Appraisal ambiguity often arises from trend-relevance ambiguity, normative ambiguity, and all forms of causal ambiguity in explaining outcomes.

The termination function of considerations, preparations, and execution of ending a prescription is subject indirectly to the same ambiguities as appraisal. Beyond budget collapse or a new administration substituting its own programs, discretionary termination often depends on sufficient support based on definitively negative appraisal. Terminations often reflect the normative ambiguity of how—if at all—to compensate people deprived through the termination. The termination of programs benefiting one set of people typically results in the allocation of resources to others.

Diagnosing via malfunctions

The policy sciences framework suggests criteria for assessing how well each decision function is contributing in any specific decision process (Lasswell, 1971, 86–96). In diagnosing how unfair, harmful, or otherwise counterproductive decisions are made, these criteria can be inverted to identify the typically most concerning malfunctions related to each function, keeping in mind that unfairness and harm could result from any of these malfunctions. Myriad malfunctions could be identified;¹¹ Lasswell (1971, 95) suggests a “simplification…to restrict attention to a limited number of indicators of malfunction, since these may show where structural changes are needed.” The malfunctions are:

Intelligence: inconsistent, narrow, irrelevant, unimaginative, exclusionary.

Promotion: exclusionary, disjointed, irrational [in terms of actors’ goal-seeking].

Prescription: exclusionary, irrational, inconsistent.

Invocation: undependable, irrational, dilatory, provocative.

Application: irrational, inconsistent.

Termination: dilatory, imbalanced, callous.

Appraisal: undependable, narrow, irrelevant, irrational.

When decisions experience any of these shortcomings, the diagnostic task is to identify the malfunctions related to each of the challenges of the next four sections.

Establishing state poverty-alleviation programs

The most viable efforts to establish poverty-alleviation programs involve mobilizing others, building coalitions, selecting viable alternatives, and deploying coalition resources.¹² Probably the most common challenge is the diversity of preferences and expectations among potential coalition members, even if agreement on broader goals exists. Agreement with respect to a specific initiative may be deterred by the intelligence malfunction of inadequate understanding as to whether it would be counter-productive, or its adoption would preclude a better program. For example, some pro-poor advocates bemoan the limits of even the major CCTs, asserting that the aspirations for redistribution should be higher. Nelson and Sandberg (2017, 32) argue that “Burdening small policies such as CCTs with unrealistic expectations guarantees policy failure and empowers political forces aimed at stalling the expansion of social policies. Indeed, expanding a targeted policy such as CCTs may actually thwart the expansion of more inclusive welfare systems and reaffirm existing inequalities.”

Regarding major poverty programs in Brazil and Mexico, Tomazini (2021, 4) notes how normative ambiguity of value priorities shapes preoccupations with different causes attributed to poverty—"lack of investment in human capital, lack of entitlement to an unconditional basic income, and lack of food security”—hence different prescriptions. Disagreements over the very concept of poverty has led to opposition to the use of family income as the criterion of eligibility.¹³ The multiplicity of deservingness criteria (e.g., neediness, helplessness, past or present discrimination, potential for improvement, etc.) also can threaten a coalition. Khan and Lok (2013) report a failed micro-finance initiative in Pakistan that foundered on disagreements among officials, low-income stakeholders, development practitioners, entrepreneurs, and bankers, divided over financial accountability, client empowerment, and sustainability. The inability to overcome normative disagreement reflected poorly integrated promotion and prescription functions.

These challenges to overcoming normative differences and divergent expectations sometimes can be addressed by leaving the eventual content of social policy ambiguous during the development of concrete proposals. A common strategy to keep a coalition together is to over-promise. Baier et al. (1986) argue that ambiguity left in a “something for everyone” approach may be essential for the policy’s passage. Coalition members may cooperate despite conflicting interests, if they believe their priorities may prevail, or they would prefer a suboptimal program over no program. Palier (2005) documents how ambiguous understandings of the consequences of social policy reform initiatives in France in the 1990s permitted the development of substantial advances that may not have occurred if the specifics had been known earlier. Once design deliberations are launched, coalition members can jockey on behalf their objectives. Thus, a poverty-alleviation initiative held together by excessive commitments could be sustainable with sufficiently impressive achievements of some objectives, despite falling short on others. The aforementioned disagreements regarding the Brazilian and Mexican CCT programs, despite ferocious debates among its advocates over the priorities (e.g., food security, education, human capital development, universal income rights, etc.), and program design (eligibility criteria, participant responsibility, etc.), nevertheless led to programs that have long survived the conflicts (Tomazini (2021).

Challenges to benefit targeting

The most prevalent challenges to effective programs are the related problems of exclusion of the eligible and inclusion of the formally ineligible. With a budget constraint on the volume of benefits, the inclusion of the ineligible squeezes out the eligible. Inclusion of the ineligible has two potential sources: accepting applications by the ineligible, and continued participation if they become ineligible. Exclusion can result from many obstacles: lack of budget resources for all of the eligible, unawareness of the program, inability or reluctance to apply, rejection of the application, voluntary or involuntary withdrawal from the program, and program suspension.¹⁴

Poverty-alleviation programs face generic problems. The ambiguities that make the prescription function inconsistent give administrators more discretion than the program creators may have intended, often resulting in inconsistency in the application function and provocative invocation that exacerbates conflict. Regardless of whether administrators want this discretion, prescription ambiguity and incomplete information require administrative discretion over who is included.

However, if fairness means serving the most vulnerable, some ambiguity could enhance fairness in providing leeway to include families that do not meet formal criteria; e.g., families currently above the poverty line, but likely to be below again. Yet, a high degree of ambiguity runs the risk of favoritism or negative discrimination.

The unfairness of eligibility decisions is likely to reflect the degree of societal polarization. The premise is that fairness is likely to erode in the polarized context of an exclusionary prescription function, because administrators are more likely to abuse ambiguity to favor particular groups if tolerance for unfairness is high among those holding the administrators accountable. However, if these biases are more widely known because of better information, policymakers and implementers would be more likely to face sanctions if the favoritism is extreme, thus reducing the provocation of polarized prescription and invocation functions.

The exclusion of eligible families is particularly troubling when eligibility to the entire range of programs rests on a precarious invocation and application functions. In India, the crucial Antyodaya cards for the very poorest families are poorly allocated because of ambiguous criteria. The Drèze et al., (2019, 43) surveys of card access “suggest that the post-NFSA distribution of Antyodaya cards was somewhat haphazard, possibly due to this lack of clear eligibility criteria. Quite likely, many households lost their Antyodaya cards for no valid reason…The Antyodaya programme is an important means of providing enhanced support to the poorest households, but it seems to need urgent attention. The eligibility criteria lack transparency.”

When the eligibility of cash transfer programs depends on “proxy means tests” that indirectly estimate incomes or other deprivations, the level of ambiguity undermining accuracy of measuring poverty varies according to the nature of the proxy. A model “predicting” income levels as a function of known factors (dwelling size, construction materials, ownership of vehicles or other appliances, etc.) is vulnerable to an intelligence function marked by the inclusion of irrelevant elements, and arbitrary weights of the elements overall. Castañeda (2005, 4–5), assessing a multi-element poverty index to assess eligibility for Colombia’s poverty-alleviation programs, found that opaque criteria lead to “major concerns… expressed regarding the possibility of manipulation, favoritism and misuse of [the system] by local authorities.” Widjaja (2009, 7) reports a highly inconsistent invocation function: because Indonesia’s poverty index requires an unwieldy set of 18 indicators, “there are some reports that BPS surveyor did not ask all of the questions, that they asked only 3–4 questions out of the 18 questions due to time constraint.”

A second proxy means test approach relies on judgments of some combination of officials, community leaders, and general community members. Whatever biases these actors hold may distort the eligibility judgments, especially if the promotion and prescription functions exclude the more isolated families. Newman and Zhang (2015, 2), assessing social assistance targeting in Vietnam, report that:

The first step in the classification process is village leaders drawing up a list of households eligible to be classified as poor…The list is reviewed by local authorities and is published in each village. A community meeting… determines which households from the list will be identified as poor… decided by a vote… The list of households identified as poor is then submitted to the district, province, and central governments…The ambiguity surrounding much of the procedure … provides significant scope for households to use connections to influence the process.

Another eligibility approach presumes that people within a geographic area (from a single school to an entire province or state), share the level of poverty indicated by the area’s overall level. Although it may be combined with other targeting (e.g., in France, geographic targeting designates affirmative action for students of schools in low-income neighborhoods¹⁵), geographic targeting may be used alone to determine eligibility.¹⁶ Despite its popularity for its apparent efficiency, the obvious limitations are in excluding the poor living in wealthier areas and including the non-poor in the targeted area (Elbers et al., 2007). The intelligence function weakness of lacking definitive criteria to determine either the scale or boundaries of the geographically-targeted areas provides opportunities for manipulation. Tabellini (2005, 13) notes the political usefulness of selective geographic targeting, especially when an area might be pivotal for a regime’s re-election. Haddad and Adato (2002, 215) point out that the Western Cape Province workfare was targeted to a district with only a 7.44 percent poverty rate despite South Africa’s much higher overall poverty rate.

Going beyond the generic problems of social protection programs, specific program types face distinctive problems of ambiguity. Five program types are prominent, some representing hybrids of the four types of benefits outlined in the introduction. Within the category of asset transfers, the most prominent approach is cash transfer programs—unconditional or conditional. The expenditure-savings approach is represented by subsidized prices for goods and services that the poor are either likely consume, or have to qualify to receive discounted prices. The category of state-created access advantages is represented by guaranteed employment, access to income-generating resources, and affirmative action. Both conditional cash transfers, requiring education and healthcare, and affirmative action enhancing education or job experience, also contribute to human capital.

Cash transfers

Unconditional cash transfers

Ambiguity may permit either favor or animus with respect to cash transfer programs. Some income-threshold unconditional cash transfers have astonishingly high inclusion and exclusion errors. Golan, Sicular, and Umapathi (2017, 23) find that even by 2009, the third year of China’s rural Dibao, the inclusion error was 86 percent, with an exclusion error of 91 percent. Even for the urban Dibao, in existence since 1999, Chen, Ravallion, and Wang (2006) find the 2003/2004 the inclusion error was 49 percent and the exclusion error 71 percent.

Cash transfer eligibility decisions are pervasively problematic, as ambiguous criteria provide wide invocation discretion. Asri et al. (2020, 4), addressing biases in the distribution of old-age pensions in India, conclude that: “In a context of widespread corruption, the officials can make use of the ambiguity created by the higher complexity to allocate benefits in line with their own preferences. While the accuracy of a poverty indicator often increases with the number of specific conditions, these conditions may simply not be enforceable.”

Allocative ambiguity due to limited resources also can permit favor or disfavor for any benefit transfers. Distelhorst and Hou (2014, 203) found that in allocating China’s Dibao, “local officials were 33% less likely to provide assistance to citizens with ethnic Muslim names than to ethnically-unmarked peers.” In other contexts, favor or disfavor may be more personal in channeling benefits to relatives or friends, facilitated by the same ambiguity as to which criteria should be used in establishing eligibility.

Cash transfers for displaced persons, whether or not involving income testing, often engage ambiguities as to migration motives. Displacement due to fear of violence, often a criterion for state support, may be indistinguishable from “seeking a better life” where violence poses some risk. Zea (2019) documents the difficulties of Colombian migrants appealing for assistance to skeptical administrators who suspect that many migrants simply aspire to better lives.

The impact of ambiguity on exclusion of the eligible is perhaps most lamentable in the cases of disliked ethnic minorities displaced through state actions. Yoltar (2020, 160), assessing the decisions to honor the Turkish government’s obligation to provide assistance to impoverished displaced Kurds, concludes that the “neat bureaucratic documentation constituted only a small part of the poverty verification and beneficiary selection process in the office. It was state officials’ interpretations of who is deserving poor that played the central role in the distribution of state aid.” Yoltar recounts a Turkish official’s rejection of a Kurdish woman’s appeal after her request for state aid had been rejected. The official drew unsupported conclusions regarding the family’s wealth, but a decisive factor was that she was not humble enough. Yoltar (2020, 163) concludes that the official was punishing the Kurdish woman for “shameless” questioning of her initial denial of benefits.¹⁷

Conditional cash transfers

CCTs are more complicated. They have gained widespread favor, adopted in over 70 countries, on the premise that offering cash can induce compliance with conditions, ranging from children’s school attendance and inoculations, to work and training. In addition to the ambiguity as to who qualifies for any cash transfer program, ambiguity exists as to whether instances of non-compliance are serious enough to penalize or disqualify beneficiaries.

The inclusion and exclusion errors of income-threshold CCT programs also are often extremely high, even discounting the possibility that exclusion error calculations may be exaggerated.¹⁸ Stampini and Tornarolli (2012) report that as the Ecuadorian and Mexican CCTs expanded, the share of non-poor beneficiaries increased from 46 to 65 percent in Ecuador during 2004–10, and from 40 to 61 percent in Mexico during 2002–10.

For Mexico’s CCT, vocales—prominent women who themselves are CCT beneficiaries—recommend which other families ought to be considered. Crucifix and Morvant-Roux (2018, 85) report that “While criteria appear clear and straightforward, the way selection is made in practice gives rise to many complaints by non-beneficiaries who find it highly unfair.” Moreover, Crucifix and Morvant-Roux (2018, 85) clarify how dysfunctional the application of selection criteria is in giving the vocales coercive authority over applicants; the concern that eligibility decisions are arbitrary has compelled some applicants to submit to unpaid community service tasks (faenas), such as street cleaning, for fear that vocales would disqualify them (Crucifix & Morvant-Roux, 2018, 85–86).

In Brazil, the conditional cash program long labeled Bolsa Familia (replaced in 2021 with right-wing populist President Jair Bolsonaro’s Auxilio Brasil) suffered from lax monitoring of income statements and conditions compliance, resulting in accusations of favoritism and patronage. Assessing the early years of the program, Soares et al., (2010, 177) reported that nearly half of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia CCT beneficiaries in 2004 were not technically eligible; they also reported that 59 percent of families eligible for Bolsa Familia were excluded as of 2004. Soares (2011, 55) argues: “That the programme is not embedded as a right has lent it the flexibility to adapt but also brought it under more scrutiny and accusations of being used for political purposes than any other social assistance or protection project in the country.” Since then, the program has been gradually refined, and eligibility tightened.¹⁹ Paiva et al., (2020, 38), based on the latest official national household survey, report that.

Bolsa Família improved its targeting over the [2012-2018] period, which suggests that this progress resulted from continuous refinement of the programme’s management, and not from any single measure adopted during any specific year. The analysis of the programme’s concentration coefficient reveals that it has managed to enhance its potential to fight income inequality. Despite these indicators, it is estimated that nearly a fifth of the ten per cent poorest people in the country do not benefit from the programme.

In fact, although the percentage of the poorest decile receiving the Bolsa Familia benefits increased by 6.3 percentage points from 2012 to 2018, it was still only 38.9 percent in that last year (Paiva, de Souza, and Nunes (2020, 38).

Because CCTs formally require compliance with conditions, unclear disqualification criteria also permit arbitrary decisions. For Indonesia’s National Community Development Program, Marhaeni et al., (2017, 384) report that in Bali,“the ambiguity of sanctions for beneficiaries who do not meet the ongoing obligations.” This ambiguity is deepened by lack of clarity as to how far program personnel should go in working with non-compliant families. A key aspect of role ambiguity is whether administrators see themselves as helpers or enforcers; needing to demonstrate the program’s success or its protection from non-compliant participants. Dysfunctional promotion and prescription failed to clarify the administrators’ role. The ambiguity may permit administrators to avoid conflict with program participants through extreme leniency. For example, the officially reported compliance of the Philippines’ CCT program, Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino, with an 85 percent school attendance requirement was “98.99% for school attendance of children aged 6–14; 98.33% for school attendance of children in daycare aged 3–5; 97.05% for school attendance of children aged 15–18” (Republic of the Philippines, 2016). Such implausible compliance rates may reflect extraordinary efforts by the program administrators, or considerable leniency in accepting reasons why non-attendance should be overlooked. In other cases, leniency is overt; Schady et al., (2008, 25) report: “In Ecuador, enrollment conditions were never monitored, and households who did not enroll their children in school were not penalized.” In contrast, Heracleous et al. (2016) note the large number of enrollees in Mexico’s Oportunidades who were penalized with lower payments because of low school attendance.

Ambiguity in enrollment duration also leaves open the possibility of favoritism. Panama’s CCT permits enrollment for up to four years, with exceptions to extend the benefits through a “recertification process” if the program manager deems it appropriate. Corrales-Herrero et al. (2021, 209) note that “It is unclear whether a beneficiary is leaving a programme due to their having overcome the situation of poverty, budgetary adjustments or whether it is the result of political favouritism or patronage.”

Subsidies for goods and services

The three approaches to reduce costs faced by the poor—universal price subsidies, price subsidies for “inferior goods and services”, and price subsidies for people qualifying as low-income—face different problems of ambiguity.

Universal price subsidies, commonly applied to foods and fuels, face normative and causal ambiguity. Contrasting normative considerations are that drawing budget resources to subsidize the non-poor may reduce the resources for more productive purposes, including poverty alleviation, yet they avoid stigmatizing the poor (Standing, 2008). The intelligence limitation is uncertainty as to whether they are indeed wasteful, compared to other ways to benefit the poor.

Inferior goods and services, as “self-targeting” instruments, also have normative and causal ambiguities. A normative objection is that subsidizing only inferior goods or services (e.g., coarse grains, un-air-conditioned buses) relegate the poor to inferior experience. The causal ambiguity lies in whether the subsidies actually exclude the non-poor.²⁰

Price subsidies for low-income people typically require documentation of means-tested income levels. India’s Public Distribution System provides food price discounts for “priority households”, and steeper discounts for “Antyodaya households”—the poorest of the poor (Drèze et al., 2019). They are similar to means-tested income transfers in being subjected to the possibilities of under- or over-estimating family income levels, lack of opportunity to qualify, and loss of documentation. The prescription malfunction is in not accommodating the vast number of families that cannot demonstrate eligibility, leaving huge challenges for case-by-case invocation and application. Panda et al. (2020) report that 16 percent of families below the official poverty line lack the welfare cards that entitle them to subsidies for cooking fuel, employment, food, health insurance, old-age pensions, and sanitation.

Guaranteed unconditional employment

Employment guarantee programs enacted in a wide range of countries are distinct from guaranteed civil service employment reserved under affirmative action or CCT programs, in that the transfer quotas are not set. Also, in contrast to many CCT programs, employment guarantees do not entail interventions to keep families in compliance.

India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is by far the largest unconditional employment program, having employed over 50 million people (India, Government of, 2005; Ushadevi, 2017; Ravallion, 2019; Narayanan, 2020). Expanding beyond state programs in phases beginning in 2006, it “guarantees” 100 days of public-works minimum-wage employment annually for any rural household, to be provided within 15 days of written application, within five kilometers of the household or travel expenses if the work is more distant.

As a prime example of over-sell, reflecting a dysfunctional promotion effort, MGNREGA has been chronically short of projects and funds to accommodate demand. From 2006–07 to 2013–14, the number of workdays per household was 45, despite the 100-day commitment (Kumar, 2018). The inadequacy of supply has become even worse, as the pandemic has led to millions of people, now returning to their villages, in search of rural work. Of course, not all workers wish to work 100 days, but complaints about lack of work are prevalent in many Indian states.

This scarcity of opportunities gives village administrators discretion in assigning workers, taking advantage of ambiguous guidelines in qualifying for a job card or being assigned to a project. Saha (2019) reports discrimination against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in getting MGNREGA employment in Rajasthan. Raabe et al., (2010, 20), report that Bihari MGNREGA workers “complained that the gram panchayat president issued the job cards only to those who had voted for him during the gram panchayat election or those close to him…”.

Access to income-generating resources

Raising income opportunities through policies that reserve physical assets for the poor, as distinct from employment guarantees or affirmative action, is particularly relevant for forests, fisheries, and other natural resources traditionally exploited by low-income rural populations. Many governments had ignored customary rights of local people, but their demands (often reinforced by civil society) have led to re-examination.

Four ambiguities resting on prescription malfunctions complicate user-rights allocation: (1) overlapping state and non-state authority boundaries; (2) how far non-state rights should go; (3) whether the rights are recognized as inherent or as privileges subject to the government’s discretion; and (4) whether a group has the standing by residence or other criteria to claim the rights.

For example, in Indonesia the “customary law communities” are accorded, by the Constitution, with user rights to the land they traditionally have occupied (Van der Muur, 2018). Yet, the constitutional provisions are rife with caveats that have resulted in dysfunctional invocation:

Article 18b(2): “The State shall recognize and respect, to be regulated by law, the homogeneity of societies with customary law along with their traditional rights for as long as they remain in existence and in agreement with societal development and with the principle of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia.”

Article 28I(3): “the cultural identities and rights of traditional communities are to be respected in conjunction with progressing times and civilization.”

The district authorities have the discretion to decide whether a customary law community remains “homogenous”; whether it conforms to the vague objective of “societal development”; and whether “progressing times and civilization” permit justify respect for their rights. Bakker (2008) documents cases in which district officials denied user rights on the grounds that insufficient information had been collected by researchers. It was not until 2012 that areas designated as “customary forest” were no longer also designated as “state forest” (Butt, 2014).

Affirmative action

Affirmative action (or “reservation”), based on concern for past or present deprivation, is premised on the presumption that categorical criteria can identify groups that have been sufficiently uniformly deprived, and that the benefits will improve their lives and compensate for past injustices. Because the benefits—priority for university admission, government employment and contracts, etc.—can be very attractive, contention over who qualifies can be intense and destructive.

Disputes over who fits the criteria may arise because of ambiguous boundaries of a single defining characteristic; arbitrariness lies in defining the threshold of the criterion. If multiple criteria are relevant (e.g., low income and poor health), then disputes may be over whether which criteria are relevant, and the weight of each. The Brazilian and Indian cases illustrate the ambiguity.

Brazil’s affirmative action

The Afro-Brazilian affirmative action program has had significant success in increasing the numbers of Afro-Brazilians in public service and enrolment in prestigious universities, but it has aroused fierce controversy as to whether eligibility ought to be based on Afro-Brazilian identity or physical appearance. (Bevilaqua, 2015; Da Silva & Larkins, 2019; De Oliveira, 2017; Telesur, 2016). Ultimately, the phenotypic criterion was formally adopted. Yet, even this leaves ambiguity: how dark-skinned, how flat the nose, how curly the hair?

In fact, the formal criterion is by no means unambiguous because of dysfunctional invocation. For the three-person “commissions” that judge whether an individual qualifies as Afro-Brazilian for public employment, Lempp (2019, 13) reports that “the commission members distinguish phenotype from two other aspects that critics of the verification procedures often put forward as being relevant: identity and ancestry.”²¹ The phenotype criterion is widely seen as problematic according to normative principles as well as Brazilian law. Lempp (2019, 13) continues:

Critics like the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA) see [the external evaluation] as a violation of the right to self-declaration, legally fixed by Brazil’s Racial Equality Statute as well as by various international conventions… For the ABA, the evaluation by phenotype therefore ‘constitutes a flagrant backlash […], giving space for the reissuing of theories and practices that reify the existence of races’…

Yet, if the priority is to reduce discrimination, then the commissioners would justify the phenotype criterion: “[T]hey argue that the affirmative action measures are supposed to support those who suffer from anti-black racism – and that racist discrimination in Brazil would draw on the physical characteristics of a person, not on their sense of belonging” (Lempp, 2019, 13–14).

These conflicting interpretations reflect the normative ambiguity as to reasons for affirmative action. Enhancing respect for Afro-Brazilians, promoting Afro-Brazilian solidarity, reducing discrimination, developing Afro-Brazilian leadership, compensating for past injustices, reducing Brazil’s inequitable income distribution, making Brazil a better society overall—all are laudable, but have conflicting implications for how invocation decisions ought to be made. The ambiguity of the prescription and invocation has led to bitter division among those who identify as Afro-Brazilian, with dark-skinned students denouncing (and, in some instances, forcing expulsion) of light-skinned students from universities (De Oliveira, 2017). These normative clashes are exacerbated by the broader opposition to affirmative action. Da Silva and Larkins (2019, 900) report that: “Tensions around quotas have led to scapegoating and hostility that positions black college students as cheaters who are unable to cope with the rigors of college work.” Campos and Júnior (2020, 207) note the continued resistance to Brazilian affirmative action within universities: “Most of these programs are in the field of humanities, given that such measures still meet a great deal of resistance from the hard sciences”.

India’ reservation programs

Normative ambiguity is even more pronounced for India’s reservation system, and with direr consequences of disruption. The conflicts involve the expansion of affirmative action beyond the fairly well-defined,²² clearly immiserated Dalit (“scheduled castes”; “untouchables”) and Adivasi (“scheduled tribes”). Indian affirmative action, also focusing on reservations for higher education and public employment, differs in one important respect: in India the bases of the categories alone are contested, but an additional category with extraordinarily ambiguous boundaries emerged. While only modest ambiguity exists in the boundaries or socio-economic marginality of Dalits and Adivasi, the expansion of affirmative action to “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs), with much murkier claims, has been highly corrosive.²³ Reacting to the economic and political challenge of privileging a large proportion of the Indian population, higher-caste protests, including arson, occurred in the 1980s. Jaffrelot (2006, 184–185) relates reactions to the expansion of OBC status:

In 1990, the upper caste students… protested against both their loss of job opportunities and the challenging of a sociopolitical order they had always dominated (quotas in favor of the Untouchables [Dalits] having hardly affected them). Street demonstrations multiplied, [63] students set themselves on fire… and the Supreme Court finally ordered the announced measures to be suspended [although this was later reversed].

Groups seeking or defending their OBC status also engaged in highly disruptive acts. In 2016, Jat protests in the state of Haryana escalated to burning public buildings, houses, and vehicles, and robbery of an arsenal, with 15 deaths reported (Chatterji, 2016). Kumar (2021, 10) notes the success of these tactics: the Jat mobilization resulted in “forcing the respective state governments to take cognizance of their demands and also announce a quota for the communities.”

The contention began in normative ambiguity. Many constitutional drafters opposed caste distinctions altogether; many lower-caste activists view expanding affirmative action as sharing the same rationales for assisting deprived Dalits and Adivasi: past discrimination and current deprivation. An even more fundamental normative ambiguity is in the framing of expansion of OBC privileges, especially in gaining bureaucratic positions, as the struggle to undermine the socio-political dominance of the Brahmins and other upper-caste groups.²⁴

Yet, in contrast to low categorical ambiguity in designating Dalits and Adivasi and their marginality, the OBC category lacks clear cut-offs in the degree of past or present deprivations. To justify the hereditary rather than income criterion, some prosperous subcaste leaders invoke past rather than current deprivation—reparations. Thus, some subcastes with many wealthy and powerful members have benefited, typically out-competing people from poorer subcastes lacking the advantage of higher-quality private education. Reactions against perceived injustice include reform to shift to income proxies such as expanding the current public high school quota to replace the OBC criterion, and piecemeal changes to exclude particular subcastes (Raju, 1986; Deshpande and Yadav, 2009; Jaffrelot, 2006; Deshpande & Ramachandran, 2016).

Even the meaning of “OBC” is symbolically ambiguous; it can mean “backward, weak, and deprived”, or achieving OBC status can convey the sub-caste’s strength in fighting for economic and political gain. Weakening the connotation of backwardness reduces the likelihood that subcastes would withdraw from affirmative action out of group pride.

Jurisdictional ambiguities of administrative mandates

The effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs, beyond the accuracy of targeting, faces challenges of resource misallocation and disorganization caused by agencies working at cross purposes. Jurisdictional ambiguity can mean that essential functions in creating and enacting programs are neglected because of confusion and inconsistency of processes, assignment of responsibility, or rules. Responsibilities are often shared by a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions, as with school feeding programs depending on cooperation from education ministries and food and nutrition agencies. A prescription disfunction may fail to assign clearcut responsibilities. Different agencies have different mandates, and may have different clients. For example, local government officials would be expected to support the home community’s access to poverty-alleviation funds in preference over migrants who may be “clients” of a national government’s agency. Akbar et al. (2019, 78), evaluating the weaknesses of a West Javanese poverty alleviation program, note that “there is the Presidential Regulation about the coordination team of poverty alleviation, but the Presidential Regulation has not been elaborated in an operational regulation in terms of coordination between organizations managing poverty prevention programs.” As a result, “[t]he lack of clarity about the division of labor has also created an ambiguity in inter-agency roles which has caused a lack of inter-agency coordination.” (Akbar 2019, 79).

Highest-level government officials often strive to resolve jurisdictional ambiguity that exists at the same governmental level, in order to dampen bureaucratic infighting. Yet, even if such efforts have been successful, novel situations may create ambiguity if two or more agencies’ mandates are newly engaged. For example, when the Costa Rican government responded to a wave of migrants into largely unoccupied forest land by providing them titles, authority was unclear among the forestry agency, the resettlement agency, the state electricity enterprise, the irrigation agency, and the agriculture ministry.

Jurisdictional ambiguity related to authority held by different levels of government often is particularly controversial for federal systems, in which subnational governments have constitutionally-guaranteed powers. For example, in India the federal government earmarks poverty alleviation “schemes” for some of the fiscal transfers going to the states, yet the states have considerable latitude in how these funds are allocated or even diverted from poverty alleviation purposes (Vijayabaskar & Balagopal, 2019).

Authority may be even more ambiguous in unitary systems in which some areas have been granted semi-autonomous status without constitutional guarantees of the subnational government’s powers, as new issues arise without precedents over the balance of responsibility. In Indonesia, for example, the responsibilities for poverty alleviation programs in the semi-autonomous province of Aceh are unclear, as fiscal resources related to oil revenues transferred to the provincial government vary considerably over time, and the central government’s own funding for poverty alleviation programs also shifts.

Reducing the deprivations caused by poverty-alleviation programs

Enacting poverty-alleviation programs never comes without costs, but recognizing the ambiguities may help in reducing some deprivations. Beyond exclusion of eligible families, less obvious deprivations include intrusiveness, stigma, dependency and subservience, vulnerability from program termination, and antagonism over eligibility. Although these are mentioned above, this section focuses on approaches to address the challenges.

Intrusiveness

Uncertainty as to whether family-by-family means tests provide accurate assessments of deprivation has provoked more elaborate, and therefore more intrusive, information gathering. The prescription dysfunction that allows Turkish officials to engage in harsh interrogation of Kurdish welfare applicants (Yoltar, 2020) does not necessarily yield more accurate assessments of eligibility. While advocates of multi-dimensional poverty measures are certainly correct that income does not capture all aspects of deprivation, long indicator lists, insofar as they compel administrators to engage in lengthier interrogations, require skeptical assessment.

Several approaches do not depend on applicant-by-applicant means testing. Geographic targeting requires some information on income levels, but without intrusively interrogating applicants. A representative sample of families willing to share their information provides the poverty estimates in an area to target the program (Bigman & Fofack, 2000). As mentioned earlier, the tradeoff is in including formally ineligible people in the targeted area and excluding the poor in non-targeted areas, exacerbated by a weak intelligence function.

Some self-targeting programs, such as the subsidized inferior goods or services mentioned earlier, also dispense with means testing. A prominent example is Thailand’s “30-Baht Health-care Scheme”, capping the fee for a hospital visit at roughly US$0.75²⁵; wealthy Thais go to private hospitals. This is a case of a successful intelligence function, in that the analysis that backed the initiative correctly dismissed the fear that the hospitals would be swamped with patients seeking treatment for minor problems (NaRanong & NaRanong, 2006).

The cross-subsidy programs involving tiered pricing entail lower average prices for the poor who use less electricity, gas, water, or other utilities. Maddock and Castano (1991) describe the block pricing of electricity in Colombia; Fercovic et al. (2019) do the same for water in Chilean cities. These instruments not only avoid others knowing the income levels of the poor, but also avoid any favoritism in the invocation and application functions.

Stigma

Self-stigma and fear of social stigma, deprivations in themselves, can reduce participation in poverty-alleviation programs. Means-testing, self-targeting “ordeal” approaches such as long lines for subsidized goods, dependence on inferior goods, and the very fact of participating in a poverty-alleviation program can be stigmatizing (Lembani, 2006, 22). The causal ambiguity lies in whether poverty is conveyed as personal failure, or the consequence of socioeconomic structure. A healthy promotion function might publicize surveys indicating that even the non-poor recognize socioeconomic unfairness, thereby reinforcing social movements that share this interpretation. Similarly, casting benefits as rights reverses the attribution of failure: the state fails if people are poor. Narayan et al. (2000, 39) note that: “Poor people sometimes feel shame and anger in accepting or having to accept alms or special treatment. In India this does not appear to apply to programs that give poor people well-recognized rights, like the government ration shops.”

Labeling of the prescriptions can reduce stigma by equating benefits to transfers not generally associated with welfare. Grosh and Leite (2009) point out that a “social assistance program” for the elderly would be less stigmatizing if labeled as “social pensions”. Rodrigues (2014, 5) concludes that “by making LTC [long-term care] a social right linked to past payment of specific social contributions, it does away with potential issues of stigma surrounding take-up of benefits”. Similarly, as Bryan et al. (2021, 1) note, “CCTs include scholarships and workfare programs tied to participation in training or schooling…”, scholarships have an obviously more positive connotation than “required attendance”.

Dependency and Subservience

Normative ambiguity reflects the dilemma of trying to instill self-reliance and empowerment through programs that entail dependence on program benefits. Bauchet et al. (2015, 13), assessing a poverty-alleviation program in Andhra Pradesh, conclude:

The expected net impact of the ultra-poor program on the use of government safety nets is ambiguous. On one hand, part of the training provided to ultra-poor households was meant to empower them to connect with existing support in their community, including government social services…On the other hand, a long-term goal was to create independent livelihoods and reduce reliance on public safety nets.

Bedran-Martins and Lemos (2017, 16) emphasize the ambiguity of efforts to empower the poor through welfare programs: “the goal of social reform and creation of a complete and independent citizenry faces the reality of decades of unequal power relationship that resists change.”

The common response to this subservience is participation of the poor in the formulation and execution of the poverty alleviation program. However, Cook and Kothari (2001) (and many others) reject the participation overseen by international organizations and governments as disguised control. Mosse (2004, 643) summarizes the critique:

‘Community’, ‘indigenous’, ‘local knowledge’, ‘people’s planning’—these categories which promised keys to counter top-down technocratic approaches and to unlock the power of development for the poor turn out to be dangerous counterfeits, products of modernity, trailing colonial histories of bureaucratically invented custom and tradition…Moreover, the techniques of participation themselves (e.g., PRA [Participatory Rural Appraisal]) turn out to be disciplinary technologies deployed to produce ‘proper’ beneficiaries with planning knowledge out of local people and their ways of thinking and doing.

Ambiguity also lies in the weakness of the intelligence function to determine whether the poor involved in these interactions benefit materially and psychologically from the programs. A more fundamental ambiguity is whether relationships between welfare providers and potential recipients are appropriate for overall societal relationships. This entails an unresolvable and highly contentious ideological divergence. Even so, acknowledging the diversity of perspectives is useful for recognizing that some negative appraisal is inevitable.

Vulnerability to termination

Investing in existing program opportunities makes people vulnerable to program terminations or major changes. Termination is a risk for families migrating into areas benefiting from policies mandating lower utility rates, or programs offering stronger poverty-alleviation benefits. Aborted training programs, or cancelation of CCTs, can plunge a family into poverty. Yet, as a positive aspect of ambiguity, the flexibility to moderate the pace and degree of terminations is available if more drastic termination is too costly for recipients or policymakers. The Panamanian CCT program mentioned earlier specifies a 3- or 4-year limit, but can be extended at the discretion of program administrators (Corrales et al. 2021, 209). The general challenge is to establish constraints on how far deviations from unambiguous prescriptions should be permitted.

Antagonism

When welfare programs treat different people differently, those denied benefits may resent both beneficiaries and the authorities. If the denied group believes that differential treatment is based on ethnic or partisan differences, the resentment can crystallize into broader inter-group conflict, as in the aforementioned examples of violence between Brahmins and OBCs in India, and within Indonesian villages over the targeting of cash transfers. Intrusive means testing also may arouse resentment, as exemplified by the treatment of Kurds by Turkish officials.

Where violence or other significant disruption is possible, several approaches ought to be considered. Geographic targeting, without further eligibility tests, may be the wisest approach, despite leakage to the non-poor in the area. The “social harmony” priority of Chinese sub-national officials in the Dibao eligibility process exemplifies this tradeoff—providing benefits to entire villages, even if some are not formally eligible by their poverty levels, is a de facto geographic targeting approach. Insofar as the intelligence function is successful in identifying geographic areas that are strongly weighted to the poor, the degrees of inclusion and exclusion errors will be low, and the antagonism of the excluded poor is likely to be lower. If means testing is part of the application process, relying on evaluations by local leaders or community meetings should be carefully assessed as to antagonism due to perceived bias.

Conclusion: designing, promoting, and conducting poverty-alleviation programs

When should we worry about ambiguity? As an inevitable aspect of any policy process, ambiguity is neither good nor bad in the abstract. It opens up the possibilities of goal-directed interpretations of ambiguous rules, processes, and understandings. It can be used constructively to bring together people with moderately disparate goals, and can permit appropriate adaptations when contexts are different enough to require different interpretations of the policies or programs. Categorical ambiguity can be constructive when families of mixed ethnicity do not fully meet the criterion for affirmative-action benefits reserved to one particular ethnicity. The various forms of factual and causal ambiguity that apply to the appraisal function can open up inquiry that otherwise might be truncated by narrow measures and interpretations.

However, ambiguity can be pernicious. Some aspects of ambiguity simply ought to be eliminated. It is hard to justify any degree of contradictive ambiguity; government leaders have the obligation to resolve these conflicts through legislative changes or an authoritative court system. If implementers doubt leaders’ intent in formulating the programs, the leaders must ensure their commitment or modify the initiative such that it is credible to the implementers.

Similarly, jurisdictional ambiguity creates largely wasteful and confusing enactment problems. Several approaches can give one entity unambiguous authority as the program or project manager. Molle and Chu (2009), addressing jurisdictional rivalry in Vietnam, suggest putting one agency in authority, merging conflicting agencies under a single higher authority, or decentralizing decision-making if local authorities can address challenges cooperatively.

Other ambiguities become problematic when they reach particular thresholds. Although the promotional virtues of overcoming differences in establishing a program should not be overlooked, goal disagreement may later undermine the initiative. Responsible administrators may welcome the flexibility to provide or maintain benefits in borderline cases, but discretion can be excessive. The tactic of challenging the information and metrics used by policy adversaries can go beyond constructive debate, resulting in mutual disdain and pervasive doubt regarding existing or prospective programs. This calls for efforts to find relatively common ground on appraisal, using broadly accepted information and metrics.²⁶ Despite the benefit of categorical ambiguity in some circumstances, the ambiguity of categories in the Indian and Brazilian affirmative action has been corrosive.

In cultures in which administrators are under pressure to practice favoritism, interpretative and categorical ambiguity are problematic, as is allocative ambiguity when program resources are limited. More specificity is called for in such cases, as is serious monitoring. Lasswell (1971, 92) notes: “If special interests are to be neutralized, third-party participants are [to be] mobilized”.

The potential of ambiguity to permit favoritism needs to be recognized in the formulation of criteria and processes. If ambiguity of prescriptions is facilitating serious degrees of favoritism or vindictive decisions, the prescriptions ought to be re-examined. In particular, poverty-alleviation program designers should consider application processes that would reduce exclusion errors even if the processes result in more tolerance for inclusion errors. Whether this is advisable depends on whether appraisal indicates that formally ineligible enrolled families are nearly poor enough to have qualified, and whether ordeals designed to exclude the ineligible are highly stigmatizing for those who are eligible.

It is, of course, even better to anticipate perverse ambiguity before formal prescriptions are approved. Expert bodies serving the legislative branch often have the potential to identify vagueness or inconsistencies in draft legislation.²⁷ The relevant agencies can provide legislators with assessments as to where ambiguities exist (Walker, 2017), still leaving the legislators the option of whether to reduce the ambiguities.

Any of these initiatives could be refined with further research. The large number of cases of some types of programs provides the opportunity to conduct comparative analysis to determine how the problems of ambiguity can be addressed. Such comparative analysis could also explore how stigma can be minimized with acceptable rates of inclusion and exclusion. It would be useful to explore whether the institutions that have helped to identify and reconcile destructively ambiguous rules in some jurisdictions could be replicated in others.