O Campo Burocrático e as disputas sobre os arranjos de recursos estatais voltados à promoção da Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional no Brasil

Resumo

The aim of this paper is to analyse how disputes over the state's material and symbolic resource arrangements for promoting Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) in Brazil are played out from the bureaucratic field. In other words: how do changes occur in the bureaucracy during different processes of reconfiguration of resource arrangements aimed at sectoral public policies such as FNS in Brazil? How do the trajectories and social characteristics of the individuals in the bureaucracy, associated with their interests, ways of seeing things and positions, help us to see changes in terms of the configuration of capacities for a given policy? In Brazil, the national experience of combating hunger that began in the 2000s was pointed to as an example of a situation in which the food issue was placed at the centre of the Federal Executive's political agenda. However, after consistent periods of reduction in the country's food and nutritional insecurity indices, there was an upsurge in hunger in the following period, in parallel with a reconfiguration of the national state's actions in this area. Considering the state as a reserve of material and symbolic resources, which is both an instrument for certain types of agents and an object of dispute between these agents, the Bourdieusian perspective of social fields is used to investigate the mechanisms through which the state's resource arrangements, which can be called ‘state capacities’, are configured and reconfigured. Seeking to centralise the issue of power, an approach is developed that frames the configuration of these arrangements as the result of disputes that take shape in the exchanges between the political-bureaucratic space of a certain public domain and its corresponding field. To this end, the bureaucratic field at the level of the Federal Executive is taken as the privileged space for investigation, which does not mean looking at it in isolation or minimising the effects of nearby fields. Methodologically, as a starting point, the analysis was limited to the Federal Executive, taking the National Food Security Secretariat as the hard core of FNS policy. Without neglecting other elements of the historical reconstruction of the field, the focus is on the period 2003-2022, understood as a period capable of encompassing the moment when state FNS capacities underwent a series of configuration and reconfiguration processes. Primary data (such as interviews with agents involved in the fields in question, especially public managers) and secondary data from multiple sources are analysed, using techniques such as Content Analysis and Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The work argues that the configuration of state capacities, beyond the structure of capitals within the bureaucratic field, is related to the stage of the field (whether in formation, stable, or in crisis) and its forms of interconnection and nesting between fields. From this, it follows that fields in formation, characterised by the construction of capacities, are more conducive to the emergence of agents with high technical credentials (such as "prince’s advisors") and to the convergence of habitus. The stabilisation of the field, in turn, is associated with the prominence of agents with greater social capital of a partisan nature. Situations of stability, which are not situations of inertia, correspond to opportunities for loosening the partisan dimension and incremental alterations in the technical profile, thereby allowing for continuities and progressions in the prior configuration of capacities. In contexts of crisis, the strengthening of partisan capital at the expense of technical credentials also serves as a way to manage links that drive instability attempting to limit the autonomy of the bureaucratic field. When this occurs, there are situations in which agents with more or less external trajectories to the field emerge, exerting greater or lesser pressure on the field towards the "generalist" pole. More pronounced externality and less preservation of specialised capitals are associated with a deeper deterioration of previously configured capacities. In this regard, it is observed that technical-administrative capacities and political-relational capacities do not necessarily have a direct or inverse relationship, depending on other factors such as the multi-positionality of agents. Furthermore, the interconnection between fields indicates that subfields are more protected from movements of reconfiguration of capacities depending on how they are nested. In situations of democratic backsliding, there are attempts to reverse the dispute over the legitimate mode of achieving the public interest, which commonly manifests within the bureaucratic field in clashes over technical rationality. In response, agents attempt to preserve the previous order or seek to operate at the margins.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Tese

Ano

2025

Instituição

Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Português

Acesso

Acesso aberto

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/36535

Temas

Políticas PúblicasAdministração Pública

Palavras-chave

BurocraciaCampo burocráticoCapacidades estataisPolíticas públicasSegurança Alimentar e NutricionalAdministração públicaPolítica alimentarAbastecimento de alimentos