The street-level bureaucracy (SLB) theory introduced by Lipsky (2010 [1980]) more than 40 years ago has had considerable recognition from the scientific community, especially in Northern Europe and in the USA. These are the contexts in which most of the studies and research about street-level bureaucrats' discretion have been conducted. The adoption of the SLB theory in the Mediterranean countries, Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and Africa is still in its beginning (Lotta et al., 2022). Only in recent times scholars have begun to highlight the potentiality of SLB theory to study the impacts of neoliberalism, economic crisis, population impoverishment, migratory processes, the digitisation of welfare, the transformations in the labour market, supranational development programmes (e.g. NextGenEU, and United Nations' Millennium Development Goals) and the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on frontline workers' work practices in underexplored contexts. This is the case of Brazil (