Participação e governança, qualidade e efetividade: um estudo sobre o Conselho Municipal de Assistência Social de Montes Claros (MG)

Abstract

The present work analyzes the popular participation process through Participatory Institutions. Such analysis was carried out through the study of the performance of the Municipal Council of Social Assistance of the Municipality of Montes Claros (MG). This choice was made because this council is linked to aspects that par excellence are mainly related to those groups that historically are on the margins of the decision-making process, as a rule, monopolized by the dominant elites. In the specific case of Montes Claros, the dominant elites still have the aggravation of being historically linked to the large rural capital that exercised, in a violent and centralized way, the local power through practices that fit the concept of “coronelismo”. Thus, the planning of this research involved the exploratory case study methodology, carrying out work to organize data from the Census of the Unified Social Assistance System and the minutes of the meetings of the Council between the period 2010 and 2019, and using the method of interpretation that is called hermeneutic-dialectic, that is, with two levels of interpretation, the first being the social / historical context, and the second involving the ordering and mapping of data (transcription, re-reading, organization), as well as as its classification with the definition of the categories based on the theoretical foundation. It is observed that an important dialogue was carried out between history, sociology and political science, characterizing an analysis supported by the premises of interdisciplinarity. The final result consisted of the articulations between the context, the data and the theoretical references, made it possible to answer the questions of this research, indicating the limits of participation, which in the case of the Montes Claros Municipal Council for Social Assistance is observed by aspects such as high turnover of members and the high incidence of unanimous decisions thus consolidating the hegemony of executive power in this participatory space, however reinforcing its importance in the development of best practices in public governance.