What is the target in community development? If it is raising incomes, then a condition on cash transfers makes little sense (except perhaps to maintain work effort, or to increase human capital, neither of which would normally be spatial conditions), since the transfer is itself the goal. So CCTs don’t work as well as unconditioned aid for “pure” anti-poverty community development programs.

But they do apply to situations where the target is not simply to transfer, but to change locational behaviors. This is our second category of problems discussed in the essay.

http://are.berkeley.edu/~sadoulet/papers/ARE-CCTPrograms.pdf

CCTs are a demand subsidy for the consumption of health or education. The program has had some level of success in Mexico and is being replicated elsewhere, including New York City (though the costs and finance structure of public education is much different than in Mexico)