THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL PROTECTION THEORIES AND SOCIAL POLICY ASSESSMENT APPROACHES: AN ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD BANK GUIDELINES
Name: ANDRESSA NUNES AMORIM
Publication date: 29/02/2024
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANA TARGINA RODRIGUES FERRAZ | Presidente |
| BERENICE ROJAS COUTO | Examinador Externo |
| JEANE ANDREIA FERRAZ SILVA | Examinador Interno |
| SALYANNA DE SOUZA SILVA | Examinador Interno |
| VERA MARIA RIBEIRO NOGUEIRA | Examinador Externo |
Summary: The objective of this thesis is to understand the theoretical and methodological assumptions of
the main approaches to evaluating social policies and their relationship with social protection
standards, based on the World Bank guidelines for evaluating social policies to combat poverty.
In this sense, the theoretical and methodological nature of the World Bank's guidelines for the
evaluation of social policies for developing countries is questioned, since it is based on the
assumption that the evaluation process is intrinsically intertwined with political, theoretical and
methodologies defining public social policy and represents a substantive element in the
definition of social policy that guides the actions of public agents. In this way, politics is
characterized as the process of decision-making and governance in a society, which involves
the distribution of power and resources, as well as conflict resolution and the formulation of
public policies. In this sense, politics can be understood from three dimensions: the organization
of the State, the constitution of a regime through the State with its organizations and institutions
in their legal and administrative dimensions (polity), the field of dispute where the divergences,
speeches, ideas and the dispute of interests (politcs) and state action or omission materialized
in public policy (policy). These dimensions are interrelated and have a cause and effect
relationship. Thus, we seek to permeate the different understandings about the evaluation of
public social policies based on the premise that policy evaluations are judgmental actions,
which prevents this process from being merely instrumental, technical or neutral. It is
permeated by different interests, different worldviews, different understandings of social reality
and interpretations of it. In this sense, it is noteworthy that obtaining consensus in the dispute
over the State, or the public fund, occurs through the State in the formulation of public policies,
that is, through the influence of subordinates in the formulation of policies in a context of
concession by the classes dominant classes to the dominated classes to maintain their
hegemony. Thus, in this context of competing interests, we sought to analyze the concepts,
trajectory and approaches to evaluating social policies in a context of growth in the field of
policy evaluation. Considering that evaluation is a field in dispute, we sought to understand the
uniqueness of approaches to evaluating social policies in light of the historical moment in which
public policies, and especially social policies, go through a process of counter-reformation
associated with the advance of neoliberalism resulting in the reduction of social protection
standards around the world. This process developed in the post-capitalist crisis of the 1970s
under the influence of multilateral agencies, mainly the World Bank, whose privileged role as
an international financial agent gave it the possibility of acting as a financier with political and
ideologically oriented actions and as an influencer of designs. of public policies, especially
social policies, in fulfilling the self-assigned task of mitigating extreme poverty on the planet.
