Participação social como método de governo? Um mapeamento das "interfaces socioestatais" nos programas federais

The last decades witnessed the wide dissemination of forms of interaction and collaboration between governments, citizens, civil society and private sector actors in the design, implementation and monitoring of public policies in Brazil. This paper is an attempt to analytically map the evolution and characteristics of such forms of interaction between state and society in the programs carried out by the federal government. In order to be able to deal with a wide variety of forms of state-society interaction, which includes citizen participation in deliberative forums as well as more individualized forms of interaction such as ombudsman and call centers, we mobilize the concept of state-society interfaces. The analyses are based on an original dataset - the Managerial and Planning Information System (SIGPLAN) maintained by the Ministry of Planning - which allowed for the investigation of state-society interface in all programs developed by the federal government from 2002 to 2010. We ran both descriptive longitudinal as well as inferential analyses in order to survey: i) the evolution and dissemination of state-society interfaces in federal programs and bureaucracies; ii) the diversity of types and formats of these interfaces; iii) the associations between types/formats of interfaces and areas of public policy; and iv) the meanings and actual contributions of these interfaces to the federal programs attributed by their own managers. The findings suggest the emergence, in the last decade, of a complex ecology of state-society relations in Brazil. According to which distinct forms of statesociety interaction tend to perform different roles in program management and to be associated to specific areas of public policy and their varied institutional environments.