Public Administration, Law and Development in Brazil: Building Legally Sustainable Public Policies for an Inclusionary State

Taking into consideration the Law and Development approach and some useful theoretical insights provided by systems theory, this article aims at analyzing the role of law in general, and state lawyering in particular, in the design and implementation of development policies that promote social inclusion, with special regard to the Brazilian context. Firstly, this role is described as the provision of “legal sustainability” to government decisions and public policies in general. Then, the legal dimensions of three recent inclusionary policies in Brazil are stressed as an attempt to show how the goal of social inclusion can be pursued by means of law, with an active participation of state lawyers: (i) the Bolsa Família Program (BFP), (ii) the Pre-Salt Social Fund (PSSF) and (iii) the affirmative action programs adopted by some Brazilian universities, especially the University of Brasilia (UnB). At the end, some light is shed on the limits of the use of law as an instrument to foster development and social change. These limits, although inevitable, do not change the fact that the multiple demands for social inclusion and participation are always to be considered as a matter of juridical justice in its “sociological” sense.