Brazil: Public Management and Citizenship Program

Director: Peter Spink
Vice-Director: Marta Ferreira dos Santos Farah
Administrator: Jacqueline I. Machado Brigagão
Administrative Coordinator: Fabiana Paschoal Sanches de Moura
Programa Gestão Pública e Cidadania
Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo da Fundação Getulia Vargas
Av. Nove de Julho, 2029-11 andar
01313-902 São Paulo – SO
Brazil

Phone: (55 11) 3281-7904
Fax: (55 11) 3287-5095
E-mail: inovando@fgvsp.br
Web site: http://inovando.fgvsp.br

When the Programa Gestão Pública e Cidadania (Public  Management and Citizenship Program) awards cycle began in 1996, the questions facing Brazil’s innovators were very much linked to a lack of public faith in sub-national and, particularly, local government. The 1988 constitution set a framework for a substantial degree of decentralization, but doubts remained as to the capacity of local governments to deliver services efficiently and equitably. Now, the best practices collected in the Public Management and Citizenship Program databank demonstrate a marked increase in faith in local governance as citizen participation and innovative programming have influenced the management of the country’s municipalities.

This growth in competence at the sub-national and local government levels has a number of causes, including fierce competition at the ballot box and an overall institutional emphasis on accountability and transparency. The awards program has played its own part in this transformation, by accumulating model case studies that have been influential at the local, state, and national levels. By recognizing achievements in local governance and organizing public meetings for awardees, the Public Management and Citizenship Program plays a vital role in disseminating and reinforcing model management practices in sub-national governance.

Currently, the focus of the Public Management and Citizenship Program is to use its funding to examine the results of those experiences already identified by the program in order to gain a greater understanding of the factors involved in program sustainability and dissemination. The program is also committed to the formation of a Center for Public Management and Citizenship as a venue for discussing best practices throughout Latin America and the broader Third World. The Program has been able to establish a basis for a Latin American Observatory on Innovations, and continues to work on extending its network horizontally to include its other southern colleagues, through its collaboration  with the Ford Foundation Liaison Group Innovations Awards Programs in Chile, Mexico, and Peru.

Peter Spink is director of the Center for Public Administration and Government, and full professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s São Paulo School of Business Administration. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Faculty for Social Science and Politics at Cambridge University in England in 1998; the Philips Visiting Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001; and a visiting professor of Social Psychology at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in 2004. Before moving to Brazil, he was a member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London from 1970 to 1980. He has published widely on topics including sub-national governance, public policy, organizational change, and poverty reduction. He holds a doctorate in organizational psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London.