This dissertation includes three papers that examine the role of antipoverty policies and programs in preventing child maltreatment. Paper one examines how access to Medicaid impacts child maltreatment as characterized by Child Protective Services (CPS) reports. Paper two considers how access to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) programs affects child welfare involvement. Paper three assesses the relationship between temperature and CPS reporting, looking to air conditioning and state LIHEAP cooling policies as a potential source of mitigation.

In 1974, the Housing and Community Development Act replaced traditional antipoverty programs with block grants, decentralizing decisions about federal funding, ostensibly to give more control to local administrators. Despite the pretense of providing greater flexibility, the focus of block grants on developing the city's physical environment circumscribed the options of local planners hoping to pursue comprehensive community development. Community Underdevelopment traces the struggle of government officials in New Orleans to fulfill the dual aims of alleviating poverty and spurring economic growth in a time of fiscal crisis. Armed with new social science techniques, planners believed that with accurate data collection and systematic planning, they could achieve these ends simultaneously. However, coping with an increasingly regressive tax regime and an anemic economy, they soon discarded this vision. Instead, block grants were used as stopgap measures in low-income communities while the city pursued economic development strategies that administrators acknowledged would do little to improve conditions in those neighborhoods. By the end of the decade, the hope that the private sector could achieve what the public sector could not led the city to shift federal funds away from antipoverty measures and toward boosting private-sector involvement. Low-income communities in New Orleans struggled to resist this movement, but their efforts to do so went unsupported by local officials who feared that supporting resource redistribution would jeopardize relationships with private developers. Consequently, by the end of the 1970s, local urban development strategies had largely abandoned antipoverty aims. Rather than read this period solely as the precursor to President Ronald Reagan's unprecedented cuts to urban aid, Community Underdevelopment explores a steady shift in policy and ideology that created a political climate conducive to such dramatic reductions. Moreover, my focus on this period reveals that the movement to undercut antipoverty programs did not originate with the rise of the Reagan Revolution. Instead, it was from its inception a bipartisan assault.

Thesis (MPA.) --University of Limpopo, 2015 / Refer to the document

In the 1990s, Brazil and Mexico were pioneers in the implementation of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), which since have benefitted an estimated one billion poor families around the world. However, the initial evaluation strategies pursued by each state were different: Mexican officials partnered with US economists to implement an RCT evaluation, while Brazilians used a combination of statistical simulations and qualitative studies and aimed to secure the generation of policy knowledge to domestic experts. Based on eighteen months of participant observation in Mexico City and Brasília, 100 interviews with political and academic elites, content analysis of 400 policy documents, and historical-process tracing methods, this dissertation explains why these two similar countries, implementing the same policy, took different routes to assess the merits of CCTs, and what unintended consequences followed from these choices. I demonstrate that a key factor to achieve the legitimacy and political viability of CCTs is the knowledge regimes that states create to implement and evaluate these programs. The dissertation shows that while knowledge regimes tend to be understood as technical or apolitical machineries, they are inherently shaped by the politics of legitimation of CCTs and they produce unanticipated consequences for the ways that states combat poverty in the long-run. Only by taking into consideration the role that knowledge production plays in securing the political viability of CCTs, I argue, we can assess the politics and consequences of these programs, and how they relate to poor families on the ground.

The depression of the 1930s had an early effect on the state of Oregon. A decline in timber and agricultural production resulted in severe unemployment in the late 1920s. State and local charitable organizations attempted to care for the unemployed but they did not have the financial resources to do so. Although President Herbert Hoover was worried about the effects of the growing economic crisis on the business community, he continued to believe that the depression would be short lived despite the worsening social conditions. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president he initiated a series of measures aimed at ending the depression and bringing people back into the work force. Among those measures was the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In Oregon the WPA built upon earlier state relief organizations. However, unlike the earlier Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the WPA was a federal organization staffed with federal employees. Its programs were run according to federal guidelines and regulations and much of its funding came from the federal government. Those guidelines often worked against the state programs. The means test, quota systems, and the need to refer programs to Washington D.C. prevented the Oregon program from being as effective as it could be. In addition, the Oregon legislature and governor acted against the program by not providing adequate funding to support it. However, even though Oregonians did not always accept the WPA, they were dramatically changed by its programs. The most obvious change was in the physical appearance of the state - new roads and highways, more bridges, expanded parks, additional airports, and many new services. The state was altered politically because by World War II, the federal government had permanently insinuated itself into the life of most Oregonians. / Graduation date: 1991

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 216-221). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 283-316).

Thesis (M.A.)--Columbia International University, 2002. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-64).

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