Difusão de políticas sociais no Brasil: o envolvimento das organizações da sociedade civil (OSC) para a implementação do mecanismo de audiência de custódia

Abstract

In the field of public policy diffusion, despite studies conducted mainly in the United States and Europe (WALKER, 1969; GRAY, 1973; ELKINS and SIMMONS, 2005; SHIPAN and VOLDEN, 2006; BERRY and BERRY, 2007), the number of analyses aimed at understanding the reasons that make a policy diffuse among different countries or even between different unities of the same country is still incipient (COÊLHO, 2012a; GONNET, 2012; FARIA, 2018a, 2018b). The same scenario is also denoted regarding to researches that focuses on comprehending the involvement of international organizations or of the civil society in public policy diffusion processes (COÊLHO; FARIA; SILVA, 2016). To study a case of public policy diffusion, it is central to initially identify the actors involved, the interface in which they are inserted, in which arenas they develop their battles and what are the power disparities between them (LONG, 1988, 1989, 2007). Because it is a complex process, which occurs through structures that are not entirely transparent to the researcher, such as the backstage of the political process, the production of analyzes associated with other sciences, such as Political Science, Sociology and Law has been increasingly recurrent in the field of public policy dissemination. This study has a sociological perspective with the objective of highlighting the importance of the different actors and of the interface in diffusion cases. In particular, the role of civil society organizations, which, by a non-linear and disproportional "game", have been increasingly able to push common interest issues to public debate around the world in recent decades. This is the case of the public policy of custody hearing in Brazil, whose adoption has been recognized widely as result of the involvement of the Criminal Justice Network (RJC). In opposition to the prevailing public opinion that imprisoned people can have their fundamental rights violated, the RJC has engaged in the achievement of the mechanism, whose function is to ensure the legality of the prison and cooperate to reduce mass incarceration in the country. The results, that counted with the realization of semi-structured interviews with representatives of the RJC, displayed strategic litigation actions undertaken by its member organizations in the achievement of custody hearings in Brazil since 2011, when the topic was raised as a shared banner among its nine members.