Government Attention and Public Policies in Brazil

Environmental Legislation Panel

Abstract

The article sought to understand the trajectory and movement of Brazilian environmental public policies, from the perspective of federal government attention, in the period from 1992 to 2012. The temporal record comprises a moment when the environmental discussion was in vogue in the country, since this it was the stage for two important international conferences, such as: Rio-92 and Rio+20; as well as relevant institutional changes in the area. To achieve this objective, use the “Environmental Legislation Panel”, prepared by the Ministry of the Environment, for the application of the Punctuated Equilibrium Model, developed by Baumgartner and Jones. This model is organized based on a content analysis methodology and proposes the use of “coding units” for the security of textual documents, in order to characterize similarities and differences between past public policies, identifying the degree of priority that each subject received in a given period. For the Panel's examination, normative acts were chosen as indicators to measure the priorities of government officials and other actors, as such instruments explain the set of efforts they make in relation to the proposition, approval and approval of environmental public policies. From the application of the methodology, it was concluded that the environmental agenda of greater governmental attention was "Biodiversity", since it is in evidence in the normative production of all investigated actors: Executive Power, Legislative Power and Indirect Public Administration.