Gestão orçamentária participativa na educação superior: um diagnóstico na Universidade Federal da Paraíba

Abstract

Since the Federal Constitution of 1988, public higher education institutions have enjoyed the principles of autonomy and democratic management. Thus, participatory practices in the management of public resources are fundamental to the efficient management and good governance of these entities. Under this perspective, the participatory budget has been consolidated as a means for the optimization of financial resources, aiming at the establishment of a dialogical process and collective construction, besides instrumentalizing social control within these institutions. With these considerations, this research sought to analyze the mechanisms of operationalization of the participatory budget management model at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB). Our interest, substantiated as an investigation problem, was to know if and how the process of participation of the academic community in the budget management of the UFPB occurs. The perspective was to highlight the budgeting and financing process at UFPB, to find out if there are and what, if any, are the difficulties and advances, obstacles and weaknesses for the implementation of the participatory model, as well as the potentials in its realization, presenting, at the end of the research, a diagnosis that can foster the improvement of a democratic, participatory and decentralized management model at UFPB. In methodological terms, this research is qualitative in nature, with the aim of describing the participatory budget management developed at UFPB, through analyses focused on the institution's documents that could reveal this process, with a content-based analysis technique. The result indicated that, at UFPB, despite the volume of resources in its budget, only a small discretionary part of it can be brought to debate in the institution by means of collegiate bodies composed of representatives of the segments of the community. However, it was also noticed the inexistence of direct participation, in a public and open way in specific meetings of the community in budgetary decisions, either by the absence of internal rules, or by the absence of instances of collective deliberation in the form of committees and/or deliberative councils of participatory budget management.