Public Governance and National Defense: delimitations of the field, practices in Brazil and Latin America, and their relation with public transparency

Abstract

The rhetoric of an improvement of public administration has been largely based on the word governance since the 1990s. However, we still have highly insulated and opaque bureaucracies in Defense, whether due to their high specificity, the diffuse character of the public good they produce, or a civilian lack of interest in this topic. What are the particularities researchers should consider while applying the concept of public governance in the sectorial policy of national defense? How has the topic been regulated and managed in Brazil and Latin America? And, finally, how has the dimension of public transparency been inserted in the operationalization and evaluation of Defense governance in Brazil? The concept of governance is polysemic, which poses challenges for researchers on the topic. It is important to emphasize that public governance affects management, but it also encompasses several basic elements of liberal democracies, such as the rule of law, integrity, and accountability. Therefore, this project intends to answer the questions presented first through a conceptual reflection on public governance, and then to identify in the literature and among practitioners, what are the peculiarities of the sector in the application of these concepts. Once these dimensions are understood, the project aims to contrast the academic debate with governance regulatory practices in Latin America, evaluating, through comparative legal analysis, how these regulations treat the main dimensions of governance legally (de jure) and by programmatic actions (de facto); I intend to analyze more specifically the transparency dimension of public governance in Defense for the Brazilian case, in dialogue with the previous phases of the project, considering transparency as a fundamental necessary condition for the achievement of the other dimensions of governance.

Manager at PPGCM

Drª Karina Furtado Rodrigues

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FAPERJ - Jovem Cientista do Nosso Estado