Desigualdade, direito e estratégias políticas:uma análise do processo de institucionalização do programa Bolsa Família

Abstract

The present work analyses the process of institutionalization of the Bolsa Família program (PBF), a non-redistributive cash transfer policy in Brazil, targeting the poor population implemented during the first government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers Party. From a historical materialist political analysis, focusing on the observation of context, actors and processes, I argue that the PBF is a hegemonic policy within the Brazilian social assistance that reinforces a paradigm of welfare based on access to basic services through the market and not as universal social right. Its hegemony has been consolidated through strategies of unification, centralization and agreements among federal entities and massive coverage. These strategies were elaborated within the process of agenda definition that led to the implementation of the program. The Bolsa Família was introduced to overcome the diffusivity of previous social policies, the Zero Hunger program and the agenda of universal basic income of citizenship . The regulation model adopted is understood as a resource operated by federal managers in order to ensure the program hegemony by means of: (a) parameters centralized by the federal administration to achieve the goals, (b) inter-sectorial conditionalities that aim at decentralizing the program, but unilaterally agreed with local governments, (c) a model of performance control linked to financial rewards to municipalities, (d) a control of conditionalities and targeting counterbalanced by mechanisms of mass coverage through registration within the Single Registry of Social Programs and (e) various strategies for social legitimation (priority of payment to women, low expenditure of resources and expansion of mechanisms of social participation at the institutional level). The work offers a methodological approach for the analysis of data and researches conducted about the program, and establishes a dialogue with the field that focuses on the evaluation of social policies, especially with studies that examine the role of law within these policies, as well as with those dealing with the expansion of conditional cash transfer programs.