Acessos e território na política de assistência social: dilemas entre o preconizado e o vivenciado

Abstract

This paper presents a a critical analysis of the National Social Assistance Policy (PNAS) seeking to establish an approximation of the concepts of access and territory, both in its normative documents and in the practice of planning and managing this policy. The interest in this theme arose from the work performed as a social worker in the City of Rio de Janeiro, where the challenge of understanding the definition of access to public goods and services evidenced the need to seek critical references, based on concepts such as territory and service network, in counterpoint to the PNAS mission of promoting access. This work aimed to qualify two main aspects: the definition of social rights and access to public goods and services in the Brazilian context and how the category of territory emerges as a guiding element of social assistance policy, which mixes both the notion of a political-territorial cut , as well as a social space marked by situations of social vulnerability, using as a category the used territory category of Milton Santos. Depending on their location in the territory, the policy user will be more or less exposed to situations of risk and vulnerability. The development of the work was carried out through a bibliographic review and the normative documents of the social assistance policy, as well as diagnostic documents about the city of Rio de Janeiro, resorting to a broader discussion of the concepts of territory and access from PNAS , observing analytically the affirmation of the right while possibly accessed and guaranteed. 15 years after the advent of PNAS, how was the category of territory used effectively incorporated into the social assistance policy, in a context of worsening inequality and increasing situations of social vulnerability in the country? The panorama of extreme territorial inequality and conditions of urban plunder and sub-citizenship described by Milton Santos and Lúcio Kowarick are part of the territories, but these, in turn, have not yet been assimilated and understood by public social assistance policy, in order to mirror its uses and practices as recommended in its normative texts. The connotation of the geographical and administrative profile remains recurrent, which, despite the appeal of the territory used and its relations, contradictions, practices and links, the management of the social assistance policy has not managed to incorporate it as a central category in its planning, implementation and execution, this with regard to both the insufficiency or absence of material and human resources, as well as the discrepancy between the formulation of the policy at the federal level - which historically centralized the performance parameters - and the municipal level, which implements and executes it, but it is linked to a set of technical and financial conditions at the federal level.