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This article aims to describe the performance evaluation process of public servants in federal regulatory agencies called 360-degree feedback, from the perspective of adjusting this process to the context of the federal executive power. We employed a documentary research design in which we collected primary data using the Electronic System of the Citizen Information Service (e-SIC). The analysis of data resulted from a comparison between the existing literature and the particularities of the adjustment in the instrument to the object of study. Results indicate that such adjustment is characterized by focus on monitoring to achieve goals and results, rather than prioritizing the career development of the employees evaluated. This brings the process closer to characteristics of traditional performance evaluation methods than to the innovative features of 360-degree feedback.

Public Ombudsman’s Offices are organizations that act as interlocutors between citizens and public agencies. They are normally used when citizens need to make a complain, a suggestion or to request information. In Brazil, they became popular in the late 1990’s, boosted by the managerial movement in public administration. According to data from the Office of the Ombudsman General (OGU), in 2014 there were 285 Public Ombudsmen linked to the federal executive branch. However, despite its expansion and relevance, there is scarce research on this field, particularly with citizens as research subjects. Therefore, our purpose in the present study was to investigate citizens’ knowledge about the Office of the Public Ombudsman, as well its image as perceived by them. To that end, we conducted a survey with 400 people in central Florianópolis, SC. Among respondents, 71% said they did not know what a Public Ombudsman was. In the analysis procedure, the chi-square test confirmed the presence of statistically significant differences, particularly regarding professional occupation and knowledge about Public Ombudsman’s existence. For those who knew the Public Ombudsman's Office, it was mainly associated to the terms "complaint" and "listening to the citizen". We found a predominance of neutral and positive associations to the Public Ombudsman’s image, showing a good reputation. Among its possible contributions is easy contact with public agencies, improvement in public service quality and ease in demanding rights.

The hospital care provided by Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS) faces a challenge: to increase efficiency. In order to examine the situation of hospitals forming SUS’ public-private mix in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, this article compared the efficiency of 10 hospitals, including public, private and philanthropic institutions, using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a method that works with multiple inputs and outputs. In this method, the efficiency rate considers the mix of inputs and outputs, being more comprehensive and reliable than a set of operating or profitability indices, and it is applicable to various types of public and nonprofit organizations. The present work is a descriptive and exploratory multicase study with a quantitative approach. We selected 10 public, private or philanthropic hospitals in three health regions in the state of Mato Grosso. This allowed comparing the efficiency found in the three hospital categories. In 2011, the philanthropic (1) and private hospitals (0.96) presented better efficiency scores than the public ones (0.84). The same occurred in the first half of 2012, when the private (0.95) and philanthropic (0.92) hospitals swapped positions but continued to perform better than the public ones (0.81). In both periods, the public hospitals had the lowest total efficiency level. Thus, in this model of DEA analysis applied to all hospitals surveyed, the private and philanthropic hospitals had a higher efficiency level than the public hospitals, which we discuss in the article.

Municipal health councils, instances of civic participation in the management of the Unified Health System (SUS), were created by Law No. 8,142 of December 28, 1990. The spaces for popular participation in the public agenda are thus settled, specifically in Health, conferring differentiated character to the municipal management, which is assumed as social control. In this context and through the role and responsibilities attributed to the councils, this paper has the proposal to analyze the exercise of social control by the municipal health council in the city of Juiz de Fora. For that, a literature review was carried out in order to base this research and to assist in data processing. Regarding methodological procedures, this qualitative study used as data collection techniques semi-structured interviews, documentary research and non-participant observation, and the data were analyzed based on content analysis. The analyzes suggest incompleteness in the autonomy of the council, when traits of heteronomy are identified.

This study addresses the challenge facing Brazilian public servants to keep up to date with the complex, growing framework of legal and normative documents, so as to conduct effective analyzes and issue opinions in government agencies. Using the Policy Delphi technique, we discuss the exaptation of the scholarly citation and reference management approach to the context of analyzes and issuing of opinions in government agencies. Through Policy Delphi’s iteration cycles with Brazilian public management experts, we analyze the possible sources of resistance to the adoption of this approach, as well as policies that can inhibit or reduce it.

This paper discusses the assessment of educational policies, particularly teacher bonus pay in public education policy. We analyze the assessment of the policy implemented in the City of New York and draw a parallel with the Brazilian situation concerning the assessment of this kind of policy. Based on the literature on public policy evaluation and using documentary analysis for the New York experience and the situation in Brazil, this paper presents the evaluative experiment in New York, identifying and analyzing its design and purpose and the use of information from the process as a resource for government decision making. In addition, we show that in Brazil the assessment of this policy requires greater support of policy makers so that assessment results can be used in policy planning and improvement.

The present article analyzes the role of government actors, i.e., high-ranking officials, government leaders and bureaucracy, in implementing direct procurement from family agriculture for school meals in the municipality of São Bernardo do Campo, SP, Brazil, which met the allocation target of 100% of the funds provided by the National Education Development Fund (FNDE) for farmers' cooperatives. The analysis of the experience is based on its implementation period (2009 to 2012), and can be characterized as qualitative and field research. The text presents a theoretical discussion about the role of actors in the implementation of public policies, followed by a contextualization of the experience in São Bernardo do Campo and an analysis of the role of actors in its implementation. The article concludes that the implementation team’s discretionary and politically oriented action was fundamental to meet national guidelines.

The present study aims to understand how the microcredit program implemented in Cidade de Deus sought is contributing to reduce poverty in the segment of the population excluded by the traditional banking sector. To this end, two aspects are highlighted: one with a social aspect – the search by the poor population for microcredit; and another one – economic-oriented addressing the financial self-sustainability of the program. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with local micro-entrepreneurs, representatives of financial institutions and other entities, which provide credit in the community. The results obtained show that there are still barriers that hinder access of the poor to microcredit resources and that the institutions’ financial sustainability have guided the decisions on the beneficiaries of these resources.

This paper aims to analyze the factors influencing the innovation process in the health care provided by the City of Campina Grande Department of Health Care, in Campina Grande, PB, Brazil. Our research method is case study, and our results evidenced both incremental innovation and innovation through recombination. Among the conditions for innovation, the support of management, including senior management, stands out, as well as knowledge and experience exchange. Among the barriers to innovation, it is worth highlighting the striking shortage of resources. Our results can help improve this innovation process and add to the basis of public policy for a better healthcare for the population. In addition, evidence of conditions and barriers hitherto unnoticed by the literature allow further insight into the factors that can influence innovation in public-sector services.

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This article seeks to connect the economic and political context of the second half of the twentieth century to the discussion of democracy and social participation in order to analyze institutional arrangements like the economic and social councils as a social dialogue alternative. The neoliberal policies implemented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have led democracy into a crisis of representation and legitimacy. One of the alternatives often aimed at solving or alleviating this crisis is to expand social participation through institutionalized forms of social dialogue. Based on the experience of the economic and social councils, this paper questions these entities as a path to overcome the crisis of democracy. The root of the problem seems to lie in neoliberal policies, which reduce state regulation and aggravate social inequality, allowing economically powerful groups to hold sway over political representatives in various ways, thus contaminating spaces for representative democracy and alternative dialogue, as seems to be the case with economic and social councils.

Focusing on the field of people management in public administration, we examined the sociomanagerial environment in a university hospital with regard to its employee health management, based on the taxonomy of working conditions proposed by Borges et al. (2013) and the National Policy on Worker’s Health (PNSTT). We conducted an exploratory and descriptive study with a qualitative-quantitative approach, with a non-probabilistic sample of 81 workers, using focus groups and structured questionnaires. The analysis of data from the focus groups and structured questionnaires revealed erosion in labor relations, pressure on the sociomanagerial environment due to infrastructure, scarce participation in decision making, and perception of cultural conflicts. With regard to employee health management in the environment studied, the actions established fail to adequately comply with the contents of the PNSTT.

This paper conducts a survey of the technical-scientific literature on public health, in order to verify the nature of research on social participation and detail the limits and advances of this research, highlighting gaps and suggesting a research agenda. Articles related to the topic of “social participation” were selected from the database of the Virtual Health Library. It is a source of technical-scientific knowledge that includes other sources and is managed by an organization belonging to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the World Health Organization (WHO) office for the Americas. All articles were classified according to four sub-topics: “participation,” “councils,” “conferences,” and “other.” The sub-topics of “councils” and “conferences” were detailed according to the federative level to which they belong. The totality of articles was classified according to their date of publication and grouped by periods. There is hegemony of the sub-topic of “councils” (41%), followed by the sub-topic of “participation” (39%). Production on social participation increased in the period 2001-2010 (in relation to the interval 1990-2000). The occurrence of texts based on case studies becomes thus evident (55%).

Law 13,019/2014 reformed the regulatory framework on transfer agreements between the Brazilian Federal Government and non-profit organizations (NPOs). This article presents theoretical concepts on NPOs and analyzes NPOs accountability-related statistics available at the Administrative Agreement and Transfer Contract Management System (Sistema de Gestão de Convênios e Contratos de Repasse da União [SICONV]), for the period from 2008 to 2014. Based on an econometric model, we show that the probability of default for NPOs’ agreements is higher than those for states, municipalities and government-owned companies; this corroborates the theoretical hypothesis of NPO voluntary failure as suggested in the Three Failures Paradigm (Steinberg, 2006)

The present study aims to analyze the governance of public budgeting by focusing on the case of the “Participatory Cycle of Planning and Budgeting” (CPPO), carried out by the municipal government of the city of São Paulo in 2013. This experience represented an innovative form of participatory budgeting, engaging citizens and the city’s multiple public policy thematic areas. Despite representing a window of opportunity for the participatory construction of public budget, we argue that it was not sufficient as a distributive conflict equalizing arena, considering, especially, the historical construction of the areas of public policy in Brazil, characterized by verticalization and sectorization.

The Intermunicipal Consortium for the Development of the Ribeira Valley (CODIVAR) and the Consortium for Food Security and Local Development (CONSAD) are two public action instruments created in the Ribeira Valley, in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, to promote cooperation for local development. Over time, different actors appropriated these instruments, leading them into a state of inertial functioning, taking on a life of their own according to the representation of new interests. This process allowed the social construction of two overlapping territories, amounting to relations of backwardness within both instruments. In the case of CODIVAR, such relations explain their ability to keep a legitimized position in the local context of public actions, while with CONSAD, such relations have led the forum through paths that culminated in its emptying.

The article is the result of a survey that sought to explore the effects of social welfare services in strengthening the relational social dimension of individuals and families in situations of vulnerability, with the territory dimension as an intervening variable in this process. Six CRAS units, in four municipalities of Minas Gerais, including urban and rural areas and ranging from small-size communities to metropolitan areas, were visited. Twelve technicians and twenty users of the CRAS services were interviewed in an attempt to map the types of interaction, the public profile and the incidence of social welfare services in altering trajectories or increasing the capacities of individuals and families served by the basic protection network. The findings point to the diversity of trajectories, as well as common stories for the interviewees as a whole. The different territories indicate a precariousness, in general, of a social infrastructure, marked by the precarious provision of services and by situations of violence and violation of rights. The meetings between families and CRAS members and the relationships established show different types and degrees of intensity. The reports of women exposed more systematically to the effects of services are clearer regarding changes in trajectories and subjectivities from the CRAS meetings.

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the Municipal Policy for Early Childhood Development in the City of São Paulo, known as “São Paulo Carinhosa”. Combining quantitative and qualitative strategies, the article is based on a process evaluation of this policy in a vulnerable neighborhood in central São Paulo. Analytically, the importance of process evaluations (beyond results and impact) is emphasized, particularly in the context of new policy agendas, with complex coordination and implementation arrangements. The article intends to contribute with both the discussion about the importance and the challenges of the evaluation of municipal policies and with the analysis of implementation features that should be considered in the improvement of intersectoral agendas.

The large number of judicial cases – caseload – and the inability to appropriately respond to such caseload is one of the main problems of the Brazilian Judiciary, and of many judiciaries around the world. Although Brazilian courts have been able to increase production capacity in recent years, the growing demand generates a sense of inefficiency and results in what is known as 'court congestion'. Several factors are related to congestion, and the present study seeks to test one of these factors: the work force. The objective is to describe the relationship between the rate of congestion of courts and the available work force. Data were collected on Justice in Numbers (CNJ) database and refer to state courts from 2009 to 2016. To analyze the data descriptive statistics and linear correlation techniques were used. Results indicate that congestion rate is positively correlated to the absolute workforce in justice. However, the correlation becomes negative when the workforce considered is proportional to the number of inhabitants. This indicates that the policy of personnel allocation in Brazilian state justice is misaligned with the caseload.