The market of policy evaluation in the Brazilian federal government public policy, policy evaluation, and government responses

Abstract

The text focuses on the dilemmas related to the institutionalization of evaluation practices and their insertion in Brazilian policy making processes. Despite recent improvements in the government monitoring and coordination capacities, policy evaluation remains an unstructured area with respect to the policy-making processes.

Brazilian public policy community has developed fast in the last two decades, after the re-democratization process. The policy evaluation market has expanded pushed by the Brazilian government, higher education institutions, international organizations, audit bodies, NGOs and private consultants. The networks of experts in different policy areas are distributed through a myriad of institutions under a variety of arrangements.

Policy evaluation usually focuses on ex-post analysis of policy processes and even in these cases there aren't mechanisms destined to enforce the incorporation of outcomes in policy diagnosis, formulation, decision-making, and implementation stages of policy processes.

The Brazilian government does not have any institutional feedback mechanism oriented towards the incorporation of evaluation outcomes in the respective policy areas. There are few academic centers engaged in the process of forming and training researchers, analysts and practitioners in the field.