An appeal against "Conditionalities"

As RHVP - and perhaps Wahenga - draw to a close, I would like to use our pages to make a personal and heartfelt appeal to the social transfers community: please can we stop using the horrible word “conditionalities”?

I would like to stress that this plea has nothing to do with the debate about the relative merits of conditional and unconditional cash transfers that has been raging on Wahenga’s pages recently (Sissy Teese v World Bank): it is aimed squarely at writers at both ends of that seemingly unbridgeable spectrum. But let me at least draw on those Wahenga exchanges to quote a couple of examples:

“why bother with the moral hazard, additional cost and complexity of imposing, monitoring and enforcing conditionalities, when unconditional programmes appear to have the same effects?” (Ms Teese) 

“[CCTs] combine three key mechanisms: grants that increase the income of poor households, awareness promotion that emphasises the importance of human capital, and conditionalities that link the two” (EPRI “Designing and Implementing Social Cash Transfers” [2006], quoted by Ms Teese)

The danger is that this ugly terminology is becoming firmly entrenched in the literature: it is used over 200 times in the EPRI manual cited above[i], it has sneaked into the World Bank’s seminal “tome” on “Conditional Cash Transfers” (2009), and it is being replicated in countless papers, articles and journals.

What is wrong with the word “conditionalities”? First, it is not a word; second, if it were, it would mean something quite different; and third, it is wholly unnecessary, since we already have a perfectly good word that we can use in its place.

1)    It is not a word because it does not appear in any dictionaries, and because the irreproachable Microsoft Word gives it a red squiggly underline, in whatever language you are using.

2)    Even if were to be coined as a neologism, it would be meaningless: we can apply a “condition”, or multiple “conditions”. We can thereby make things “conditional” (ie “dependent on the fulfilment of one or more conditions”); and we can therefore have a system that is based on the concept of “conditionality” (ie the “state of being conditional”). But we cannot have multiple “conditionalities” - and, if we could, it could only mean “multiple states of being conditional”.

3)    So, if we can’t use the word “conditionalities”, what can we use instead? We need a word that has the definition of “actions stipulated as requirements before the performance or fulfilment of other actions”. Does such a word exist? Miraculously, it does: the word is … “conditions”! Try it for yourself in each of the examples cited above: you must agree that it improves them!

So this is my plea: let us have no more “conditionalities” in social transfers! But - lest this sounds as if I am aligning myself with the sassy Sissy - let us equally have no hesitation in applying “conditions” to cash transfers wherever they are agreed to be appropriate!

It is important to nip this awful usage in the bud now, because the use of conditions in social transfers is clearly a ubiquitous and fast-growing phenomenon, both in the World Bank’s portfolio and elsewhere. Or to put it another way: without wishing to cause confrontationalities, in order to have confirmationalities of the proliferationalities of the utilisationalities of conditionalities in social transfers, in both connurbationalities and rural locationalities, you need only to make random observationalities in the World Bank’s “Manual of Operationalities”!

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[i] The otherwise excellent EPRI manual is to be republished soon. Please can we ensure that it drops the use of the term “conditionalities” in its second edition?