The debate on relevance and space of social participation for the improvement of public policies was a subject of increasing interest in Brazil in the last decades. This work aims to analyze the conditions for social participation from the Brazilian public servants’ perspective. Starting from a relational approach of analysis, the main argument to be explored is that there is not enough to examine separately the performance of participatory instruments or the participation of civil society representatives in these spaces. It is essential to look at the state capacity of interacting and assimilating deliberations of participatory instances.
The concept of state capacity has a multiplicity of uses and definitions in the Social Sciences. Different dimensions of capacities are raised in the literature, such as bureaucratic and administrative capacity, political-relational, fiscal, legal, infra-structural, among others (Cingolani, 2013). This work applies the binomial administrative capacity and political-relational capacity proposed by Pires and Gomide (2016). Emphasis will be given though to the second dimension.
While administrative capacity is related to the internal conditions for state self-organization and cohesion, the political-relational capacity represents the set of skills and levels of permeability of society into the state and of state capability to assimilate interactional results.
This investigation explores the following questions: what sort of state capacities – both in the civil servants´ individual level and in state agencies organizational level – are necessary for the social participation assimilation in the several stages of public policies? What are the main barriers for the effective incidence of the participation product into the policy implementation? Two main set of data will be examined in order to face these questions. Firstly, the results of a specific survey designed to capture the perceptions of Brazilian federal servants that participate in participatory spaces. Secondly, secondary data on the level and quality of representation and interaction of the Brazilian federal bureaucracy in participatory instances.
The first part of the article looks at the literature on state capacity and recent empirical works that examine the incidence of participation in policy implementation. That section intends to detail analytical descriptors for the political-relational dimension of capacity. The second section describes the methodology and the analytical tool built to capture individual and organizational levels of capacity in the Brazilian federal government. The third section details the results of the survey application. The forth section of the article maps the identified barriers to the incorporation of decisions undertook in participatory instances into governmental decisions. Finally, the last section brings considerations on the contributions of a relational approach to the analysis of state conditions for social participation.
