Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

To fight the considerable poverty level in Mexico (43% of the population was concerned in 2016), the Mexican government uses a national program of conditional cash transfer, Prospera, aiming at the low-income segment of the population. Some scholars and international bodies argue that those government-to-people money transfer can be a tool to fight poverty, while others argue that they can be a "powerful instrument for drawing broad strata of the population into the embrace of financial markets" (Lavinas, 2013) and therefore favouring the retrenchment of the welfare state (Lavinas, 2017). This study will investigate the links between this social program and water access in Mexico using original qualitative (extensive fieldwork) and quantitative data (1000 household surveys). Due to the retrenchment of the state, the Mexican public water system shows large deficiencies. This downgrading of public services quality prevent Mexicans from using the decommodified water services and encourage them to compensate by relying heavily on commodified water such as bottled water and water tank trucks. The connection between social program and water access can be direct, if the transfer money is used to buy water, but can also be indirect if the water expenses impoverish the low-income segments of the population. For indeed, the recourse to commodified water, which is considerably more expensive that tap water, has an impact on inequalities, undermining the government's effort to reduce poverty and inequalities.