This article discusses the patterns in relations between the public and private sector in the development of a public policy. We study the relationship between the state and private companies in urban infrastructure policies in São Paulo from 1978 to 1998. The article conducts an intense dialogue with a previous study on basic sanitation policy in Rio de Janeiro, as presented by Marques (1999a and 2000). As we discuss the conditioning factors for winning bids in public tenders, we highlight the importance of relations among individuals, groups, and organizations in the engineering community by analytically constructing the category "permeability" and utilizing social network analysis as our method.
public policies; state; social network analysis; interest intermediation; economic sociology
