Conselhos de políticas públicas no Rio Grande do Norte: desafios, limites e boas práticas para a transparência ativa

Abstract

With the re-democratization process, there is a paradigm change in social participation in Brazil. There is a context where a participative environment gets more critical, with policies councils consolidating in the political field. Still in this meaning transparency becomes more critical culminating in the enacting of Lei de Acesso à Informação (LAI)[Information Access Law]. Taking into account that policy councils are spaces to promote social control and accountability, our work tries to analyze the degree of transparency in public policies councils of Rio Grande do Norte State (RN). For that, we did an exploratory and descriptive study and performed a qualitative analysis of those councils. We used an adaptation of a methodology for council review developed by CGE/MG and tried to observe in our analysis criteria two axes: publicity and communication. From our data, we observe that the majority of the councils we've analyzed was labelled as "weak" in terms of transparency. This occurs due to poor disclosure patterns and transparency limitations of these participative institutions (PIs). The most important practice of transparency consists of centralized information and it is limited by a poor disclosure pattern. A deficient disclosure pattern challenges transparency effectiveness. This work contributes methodologically when developing an analysis methodology of transparency, and an empirical contribution with a prospection of councils that will be shared to Observatório das Desigualdades.