Policy and Regulation:

Abstract

The Bolsa Família Programme is often discussed in Brazil. Its relevance, actuality and capacity to adapt to different party models and government regimes are systematically discussed. This article analyses the process of institutionalization of the Bolsa Família program (PBF) in Brazil during the governments of the Labour Party, but offers also insights in order to understand its continuity over the years despite the partisan shifts of the Brazilian regime. From a historical-materialist political analysis, I argue that the PBF is a hegemonic policy within the Brazilian social assistance that reinforces a paradigm of welfare based on access to basic services through the market and not as universal social right. Its hegemony has been consolidated through strategies of unification, centralization and agreements among federal entities. These strategies were elaborated within the process of agenda definition that led to the implementation of the program. The regulation model adopted is understood as a resource operated by managers in order to ensure hegemony by means of: (a) centralization of goals, (b) inter-sectorial conditionalities, (c) model of performance control linked to financial rewards to municipalities, (d) control of conditionalities and targeting counterbalanced by mechanisms of mass coverage and (e) strategies for social legitimation. The work offers a methodological approach for the analysis of researches conducted about the program, and establishes a dialogue with the field that focuses on the evaluation of social policies, especially with studies that examine the role of law within these policies, as well as with those dealing with the expansion of conditional cash transfer programs.