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This article considers some of the changes and continuities in social protection in Latin America through a focus on the ways in which motherhood is positioned as key to the success of the new anti-poverty programmes that have followed structural reform. It examines a flagship cash transfer programme known as Progresa/Oportunidades (Opportunities) established in Mexico in  and now being widely adopted in the region. Characterized by some commentators as a quintessentially neo-liberal programme, it is argued that Oportunidades represents a novel combination of earlier maternalist social policy approaches with the conditional, co-responsibility models associated with the recent approaches to social welfare and poverty relief endorsed by international policy actors. In the first section, the gendered assumptions that have governed Latin American social policy are described; the second outlines social policy provision in Latin America and identifies the key elements of the new approaches to poverty; and the third critically examines the broader implications of the Mexican programme's selective and gendered construction of social need premised, as it is, on re-traditionalizing gendered roles and responsibilities.

Social capital has entered development policy thinking and practice in Latin America where it converges with the premises of a new development agenda that emerged in the 1990s. Women are often central to the forms of social capital that development agencies are keen to mobilize in poverty relief programmes, but the terms of women's insertion into these programmes is rarely problematized. This article critically examines the gendered assumptions that govern efforts to build social capital, and explores some of the tensions that have arisen in post-transition Latin America between women's rights and social capital agendas.

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Cash transfers (CTs), for all their evident success in relieving poverty, have been criticised for failing to incorporate transformative elements into their programme design. In recent years changes have been introduced into the design of CT programmes that go some way towards addressing this concern. This article critically engages the meaning of transformative social protection and introduces a collection of papers that examine whether and under what conditions cash transfers can be 'transformative'. Among the issues addressed are whether CTs can be catalysts leading to positive changes, material, subjective and relational in the lives of poor people; what are the social effects of CTs for beneficiaries, their households and communities; and can they foster horizontal relationships within communities and vertical relationship with the state through developing forms of social accountability and citizenship engagement?