The politics of implementation: Seeking efficiency, avoiding corruption and clientelism

Even though the PT secured the funding and had earned the support of domestic and international capital, success was far from secured. As we will explore, the task of coordinating a bureaucracy that can efficiently enlist eligible households, channel the resources to them without overtly large administrative costs, monitor results, compile statistics, etc., becomes a herculean challenge when confronted with partisan opposition and potential corruption at multiple levels of government, among other problems. I will argue here that there were two key factors that allowed the PT to navigate the politics of implementation in a successful way.

The first factor is the creation of the Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger (MDS), a centralized coordinating state agency that brought the much needed streamlining and efficiency boost to the entire social assistance complex in Brazil. This agency was created in January 2004, and integrated the Ministry of Food Security and Fight against Hunger with the Ministry of Social Welfare (Hall 2006, 697). As previously noted, under MDS’s tutelage Bolsa Escola, Bolsa Alimentação, Auxilio Gás and Cartão Alimentação were combined under one single program: Bolsa Familia. This integration had the powerful impact of resolving intra-bureaucratic chaos and reducing administrative costs. Before the changes, families who were eligible to the four redistributive programs had to go through four separate bureaucratic processes in order to register and present themselves to four separate local offices. After MDS’s creation, each family had to complete only one application, show up to one local office, receive one single payment per month, and be registered in one federal registry.²⁰ As a result, the administrative cost to run Bolsa Familia is about 6 percent of the total value of the disbursed cash transfer, or an average of R$3.66 per household per month (Fenwick 2009, 116).

Even though MDS was the central coordinating agency, Bolsa Familia was actually a highly decentralized operation. This is a direct result of PT’s embeddedness and experience with grassroots social movements, worker unions, identity groups, etc. across the country during the years of the party.²¹ I argue that this embeddedness and the consequent decentralized governing style allowed the PT to avoid corruption and political resistance to the program based purely on party line divisions. In other words, PT’s uniquely horizontal state-society relation is the second reason for Bolsa Familia to have achieved its self-established goals.

Bolsa Familia is in essence a central-local collaboration, while local municipalities (which are constitutionally autonomous entities) work directly with MDS and the central government. Crucial tasks such as data collection, registration of potential beneficiaries and monitoring of adherence to conditionalities remain decentralized to municipal level (Hall 2006, 697). In channeling the funds to the municipalities directly, Lula was able to leapfrog powerful state governors and other state level power brokers in the legislative branch. This was important, as Lula would have had an uphill struggle to garner the support of opposition party leaders in powerful positions. In 2002, when Lula won the elections, PT’s representation at the state level was extremely low, and only 13 percent of the 27 states had a PT governor. In other words, the PT had to implement a nationwide policy in a politically hostile environment (Fenwick 2009, 122).

Working with municipalities, creating incentives for them to voluntarily join Bolsa Familia, and making sure funds were not being misused was not easy either. As a matter of fact, in 2004 only 7.9 percent of the 5564 municipalities had a PT governor. In a rather ironic situation, the ace of spades that allowed Lula to break the partisan line in the municipalities was none other than the budget cuts and fiscal decentralization process, both of which were part of Cardoso’s austerity measures.

On the one hand, the 1988 constitution turned municipalities into the federation’s primary social services providers. This mandate to offer social services, as per article 15 of the Organic Law of Social Assistance, also became legally enforceable post-2000 through fiscal regulation imposed by the federal government. On the other hand, municipalities were given little financial support to accomplish this legal mandate. In a rather paradoxical move, the fiscal Responsibility Law of 2000 turned a dire situation into a full-blown fiscal crisis from which municipalities could not escape (Fenwick 2009, 110-117). As a result, municipalities were to a large extent fiscally coerced into participating and supporting Bolsa Familia. The inflow of federal assistance for Bolsa Familia became a godsend for local governors seeking to balance their fiscal accounts while also complying with the legal requirement of offerings social services. By 2006, all municipalities in Brazil had voluntarily adhered to the program, and some of them derived as much as 40 percent of their overall budgets from Bolsa Familia (Hall 2006, 705; Fenwick 2009, 115).

Participation, however, did not guarantee transparency. To avoid municipal level corruption, Lula installed conditions for the disbursement of funds to municipalities. Under Brazil’s decentralization law, each municipality was required to set up a social council (Conselho de Controle Social) for this purpose, whose members are chosen by the mayor from public and civil society sectors (Hall 2006, 697). Furthermore, fraud hotlines were established. These measures allowed Bolsa Familia to provide cash transfers to the poor without subjecting them to the manipulation of local political patrons (Ansell 2011, 25; Sánchez-Ancochea and Mattei 2011, 312). In an equally important way, these measures promote a democratic system of checks and balances and foster the creation of public spaces for debate and for the practice of citizenship. Ultimately, the implementation of these policies was possible due to PT’s historical involvement with grassroots organizing, their deeply rooted commitment to democracy, and an emphasis on the autonomy of local authorities and social movements.

²⁰ The Cadastro Único is a census of the Brazilian poor based on a standard questionnaire elaborated by the National Secretary of Income and managed by the municipalities. It is reported that MDS was inputting up to one hundred thousand families a day into the database (Fenwick 2009, 116).

²¹ For an account of this process, see (Moreira Alves 1990).