This essay seeks to discuss political participation in the Single Health Service (SHS) based on the problematization of the options and conceptions that guide its definition as social control, made operational by means of mechanisms of representation of interests. As such, the goal was to drive reflection on how political participation in the SHS is transferred to daily institutional life, as a challenge to build modes of participative management. The Policy concept we adopt is defined not in terms of equality (formal), which opposes differences (social), rather as the co-production of a reality that is made concrete in the relationship between equality and difference, such as the access to and use of common goods, in its undetermined capacity, one that is open to the creation of value. Thinking of participation in these terms means to weave participation as the possibility to institute norms, and not only as the control of the execution and inspection of the existing norms. As such, participation in health is thought out based on the problem of constituting a public policy that can remain open and unpredictable, safeguarding, nonetheless, the material conditions of equality. In this regard, a public policy that breaks away from the modern sovereignty mechanisms by incorporating itself into its institutional design the unpredictability of normative production, becoming an ethical device for the production of value.
political participation; social control; participative management; public polices