In this fourth issue of Revista de Administração Pública - RAP (Journal of Public Administration) we have managed to bring together a set of scholarly contributions that share an empirical focus on the local level of public administration from several theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part of these articles look back at classic themes related to Brazilian municipal federalism, analyzing political and technical constraints related to the voluntary transfers made by the Federal Government, or assessing fiscal solutions aimed to manage the distortions of such a federalism. Differently, the other part of articles analyze the challenges of administrative decentralization to implementing local level administration within different Latin American contexts, such as the Colombian case.
Most of the articles published in this issue innovate when they focus on analyzing aspects of the decision making process of the public sector that have been neglected so far - such as the role of municipalities size on public spending decisions, or the importance of the modernist logic established by a hegemonic political-economic system, which has been indirectly supported in the study about funding networks and campaign investment in the state of Minas Gerais.
Finally, we highlight the use of multi-perspective analysis to better understand the complex social pathologies in large metropolitan areas - an extremely useful methodology that can be adopted by public managers of major cities.
The article entitled Political and technical restrictions on voluntary financial transfers from Brazil's Federal Government to its municipalities, by Márcia Miranda Soares and Bruno Guimarães de Melo, analyzes the voluntary transfers from the Federal Government, by means of agreements, to municipal governments. The article highlights that political (mayors belonging to the same party or President/municipalities' political alliance, which increased President's vote in the elections) and technical factors (wealthier municipalities and those with higher levels of technical capacity) affected such transfers.
The article entitled Municipal centrality and strategic interaction in deciding on public healthcare spending, by Robson Fernandes Soares, Ademir Clemente, Fátima de Souza Freire and Jorge Eduardo Scarpin, provides us with a conceptual innovation by analyzing the influence that municipalities in the state of Santa Catarina exert upon each other when making decisions regarding healthcare spending. The authors highlight a pattern of interaction in the relationship between small and large municipalities, suggesting the existence of a hierarchy within the same sphere. The article also offers some practical suggestions for designing healthcare policies, which could also be applied to other public areas.
The article by Giuliano Alves Borges e Silva e João Luiz Passador, Fiscal redistribution in favor of the development of local and regional tourism, build on the classic debate over municipal federalism and its distortions regarding revenues distribution and size of municipalities. It analyzes a new policy of tourism tax redistribution in touristically organized municipalities adopted by the state of Minas Gerais. Their findings suggest that the redistribution adopted by the Tourism Tax on the Circulation of Goods and Services (ICMS - Imposto de Circulação de Mercadoria e Serviços Turísticos) has the potential to be applied to issues of the Brazilian federative pact.
The challenges inherent to a decentralized local administration are also explored in the article entitled A comprehensive performance index adjusted to the different districts of Bogotá D.C., by María del Pilar Sánchez Muñoz, Daniel Fernando Lozano Toscano and Mauricio Fernando Moreno Infante. The authors analyze the fiscal and administrative decentralization of 19 districts in Columbia's capital, Bogota. The authors propose that administrative decentralization, by delegating and deconcentrating, is not enough to achieve the local development goals, especially if there is a lack of autonomy when deciding about investments and sources of own capital.
The article Social pathologies in the great Metropolis of São Paulo: socio-spatial analysis of indicators in the boroughs, by Graziela Serroni Perosa, Cristiane Kerches da Silva Leite, Francisco César Pinto da Fonseca and Frédéric Lebaron, offers readers an interesting discussion on the importance of multi-perspective analyses for understanding social pathologies of large metropolitan areas, such as that of São Paulo. The use of the Standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method, whose dimensions derive from the Social Health Index, offers a valuable tool for diagnostic evaluation and for the assessment of the impact of public policies. It also allows one to associate different pathological dimensions with complex generating factors, thereby enriching the poverty-wealth discussion.
The different points of view regarding public decisions with a local impact, as in the case of the investments made for the 2014 Fifa World Cup in Brazil, are analyzed in the article A "white elephant" on Natal's dunes? A post-developmentalist analysis of the discourses surrounding the construction of Arena das Dunas, by André Luiz Maranhão de Souza Leão, Bruno Rafael Torres Ferreira and Victor Pessôa de Mélo Gomes. By positioning these points of view in a developmentalist/post-developmentalist continuum, the authors highlight the key role of the logic of modernity established by a hegemonic political-economic system, which homogenizes the world and solutions without considering the cultural diversity of different locations.
Finally, the article Investment networks and campaign financing in Minas Gerais, by Gustavo Melo-Silva, also analyzes the phenomenon of inter-organizational partnerships between the state of Minas Gerais, the City Hall of Belo Horizonte and private initiative, in the form of public-private partnership contracts and investments in the 2014 Fifa World Cup. Relying on network theories, the author shows the closeness and intensity of the relationship between the State and the market, the State modernization through the specialization of organizations, and finally, the influence of economic power in serving public demands and in the private funding of electoral campaigns.
Pleasant reading!
Alketa Peci
Editor-in-chief
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Aug 2016
