[Policy State Conversation] Transversal and participatory public action: practices, instruments and hybrid referentials in Brazil

POLICY STATE CONVERSATION*

Sciences Po, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007, Paris & Zoom*

Registration

How democratic processes are engendered when handling wicked problems? In Brazil, the advent of the Federal Brazilian Constitution in 1988 and the rise of the Workers' Party to the Presidency of the Republic in 2003 were the main inflexion points of insurgency for participatory institutions, that have suffered setbacks from 2017 until 2022 and are once again platforms to guide public policies. To understand how the logics of transversal public actions operate in federal participatory arenas in Brazil, an ethnography of practices of four instances (Environment, Health, Human Rights and an Intercouncils Forum) was carried out, combining the observation of meetings, interviews, analysis of videos, minutes, reports, agendas and regulations. The concepts of public action instrumentation (Halpern; Lascoumes; Le Galès, 2021; 2014, Lascoumes; Le Galès, 2012), cognitive referential (Muller, 2013), transversal dynamic (Brugué; Canal; Paya, 2015), expertise, hybrid forums (Callon; Lascoumes; Barthe, 2009), participatory parity (Young 1991; Fraser, 2008) and interactive repertoires (Abers, Serafim, Tatagiba, 2014) gave support to the investigation. From the observation of these processes, three main types of possible results for participatory and transversal public action of national councils and conferences can be recognized: new hybrid references, sociotechnical norms and alliances among the actors.

Speaker

Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz, UnB, Brazil, Visiting Fellow at Sciences Po, CEE and Post-doctoral researcher at FGV, Brazil

Fernanda Natasha Bravo Cruz is a public policy professor at Universidade de Brasília (UnB), co-leads the Research Laboratory on Public Action for Democratic Development -(LAP2D) and is deputy director of the Brazilian National Association for Teaching, Research and Extension of the Public Field (ANEPECP). Currently, she is a guest researcher at SciencesPo-CEE and is carrying out a post-doctorate at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP).

Chair

Charlotte Halpern, Sciences Po, CEE

*Seminar of the key The State as producer of public policies