Transcending the Mexican context, this book fuses the importance of statistical data with the lived realities of impoverished people everywhere.

This book provides key insights into the nature of officer–recipient relationships and shows how they have non-negligible impacts on the way recipients feel and think about themselves and their lives using mixed methods and subjective and psychosocial well-being approaches. The importance of placing well-being at the heart of policy is widely accepted. Yet, it is far less clear how this can be translated into practice. Discussion has tended to focus on the outcomes of policy and particularly on the metrics to assess well-being. While these are important debates, they can obscure an equally vital dimension: the processes of policies and the effect that implementation can have on the experiences – and ultimately well-being outcomes – of the recipients. This is the subject matter of this book. By taking the world-renowned case of the Oportunidades-Prospera conditional cash transfer programme in Mexico, it provides an in-depth account of interactions between officers and recipients and how these influenced programme delivery and well-being outcomes. It particularly scrutinizes the implementation of the health conditionalities of Oportunidades-Prospera by physicians working in the health clinics of rural and indigenous localities.

Resilience is a desirable capability of people to deal with shocks without significant loss of livelihood, health, and nutrition. Resilience is impaired by exclusion and other forms of discrimination. Exclusion is part of a larger set of causal factors that determine marginality, which is a root cause of poverty and inequality. It is a global phenomenon, not just one of developing countries, and is fundamentally a human rights issue. Overcoming exclusion is a complex political agenda with legal, cultural, social, economic, technological, and governance dimensions. Social psychology and behavioral issues need to be considered as well. The purpose of this brief is to assess the relationships between exclusion and resilience, and to identify opportunities for overcoming exclusion and thereby strengthening the resilience of the poor. To address these complex issues in a brief note cannot do much more than raise key issues and suggest broad sets of policy actions. A few examples will illustrate symptoms, causes, and points of entry for action.

Economic shocks including food price shocks, environmental shocks, social shocks, political shocks, health shocks, and many other types of shocks hit poor people and communities around the world, compromising their efforts to improve their well-being. As shocks evolve and become more frequent or intense, they further threaten people’s food and nutrition security and their livelihoods. How do we help people and communities to become more resilient, to not only bounce back from shocks but to also to get ahead of them and improve their well-being so that they are less vulnerable to the next shock? How do we get better at coping with—and even thriving—in the presence of shocks?