Municipal decentralization in Brazil: a long, but still incomplete and challenging process by Eduardo Grin (12/2024).
“Brazil is a perfect case to analyze the decentralization of public policies, since in comparative literature it is a case characterized by its high levels of autonomy of subnational governments (Rodden, 2004). In the face of more normative positions that assume that the greater the freedom of political, administrative, and fiscal action of states and municipalities, Brazil would be classified at the end of a continuum between extreme concentration of power and devolution of powers. However, looking at the historical trajectory of the last 35 years, the analysis of the design and results achieved by decentralization are not so virtuous. As a federation, whose central premise is to be organized based on the autonomy of its constituent units (Fenna and Schnabel, 2024), decentralization in Brazil is supported by two foundations that may not coincide. In formal and constitutional terms, subnational governments are endowed with their own legal personality that guarantees them autonomy to manage their territories. In the reality of intergovernmental relations, the central government has increasingly been acting to limit the actions of states and municipalities to defined spheres of action based on the symmetrical vision of the federation, according to which it is up to the central level to organize how public policies will be implemented at the subnational level…”