Esta tese analisa os fatores que afetam as escolhas dos governos subnacionais com relação à provisão de serviços públicos na federação brasileira, tomando como objeto empírico de análise o crescimento da municipalização do ensino fundamental no país (1997-2006). A interpretação dominante sobre a municipalização no Brasil aponta o Fundef, uma norma aprovada pelo governo federal, como o único fator explicativo desse resultado. A razão para isto é que as regras desta norma federal passam a atrelar o atendimento de alunos à receitas orçamentárias, o que teria despertado o interesse dos municípios em ampliar suas redes de ensino. No entanto, esta tese demonstra que o Fundef não é um fator suficiente para explicar nem a municipalização, nem a grande variação nos graus de municipalização verificados nos estados, bem como um número significativo de municípios paulistas que, mesmo com os incentivos do Fundef, optaram por não aumentar o atendimento municipal. Esse resultado só pode ser explicado por um conjunto de fatores que incluem outras regras federais e estaduais, a situação das contas públicas no momento da implementação do Fundef, o patamar inicial das matrículas, o partido político de governadores e prefeitos e outras variáveis de contexto local, como disponibilidade orçamentária e aspectos demográficos. As principais conclusões desta tese são: 1) o interesse dos governos estaduais em transferir o atendimento para seus municípios é o fator mais importante para explicar a municipalização e 2) quando este interesse se consubstancia em programas estaduais de municipalização, com incentivos adicionais ao Fundef, esses se tornam o principal fator explicativo da variação observada. / This thesis analyses the factors which explain the choices of subnational governments concerning the provision of public policies in the Brazilian federation. As a means of empirical testing, the decentralization of primary education from the states to municipalities, between 1997 and 2006, is taken as an object of study. The predominant interpretation on this matter points to the approval of a federal norm, known as Fundef, as the sole factor explaining decentralization. The reason for this interpretation is that the norm links the number of students being attended to the distribution of revenues, therefore, motivating city mayors to expand their school systems. However, this thesis shows that Fundef is not a sufficient factor to explain neither the decentralization nor the variation observed in the levels of decentralization among Brazilian states. Furthermore, an analysis of the choices made by municipalities in the state of São Paulo reveals that a significant number of them decided not to increase their school systems after the approval of the federal norm. All these results can only be explained when a set of other factors are incorporated into the analysis. Relevant factors are shown to be: other federal and state-level institutional rules, the situation of public finances at the time of Fundef\'s implementation, the initial level of student\'s enrolment, the political party of governors and mayors, and other specific, local variables, such as the availability of budget resources and demographic aspects. The two main conclusions of this thesis are: 1) the interest of state governments to transfer the responsibility of primary schools to their municipalities is the most important factor that explains successful decentralization and 2) when this interest is transformed into state programs with extra incentives to further decentralization, these become the main factor that explains the observed variation.

Com a introdução das tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TICs) em governos, em especial a internet, tornou-se possível ampliar não só a capacidade e níveis de qualidade dos serviços prestados, mas também o enfoque na transparência, provocando diversas mudanças no âmbito do controle social e participação cidadã. Esta nova perspectiva de uso das TICs em governos para fins de ampliação de canais de participação é conhecida como governança eletrônica (e-governança). O objetivo desta dissertação é identificar quais os impactos da participação cidadã nas consultas públicas para a produção de leis e os limites e os desafios das consultas públicas online do Poder Legislativo federal. Os instrumentos de coleta de dados foram a visita estruturada ao website da consulta pública online, o e-Democracia, e entrevistas semiestruturadas dos gestores responsáveis pela consulta pública, bem como deputados envolvidos na elaboração da Lei das Lan Houses e seus apensados. Também foram entrevistados participantes da consulta pública e a associação de lan houses do Brasil. Em segundo lugar, foi realizada uma análise documental das contribuições para verificar quais as principais mudanças do pré-projeto em relação ao projeto final afim de mensurar o impacto da participação cidadã através da contagem das 10 palavras mais utilizadas em cada área documental; Proposições Legislativas dos Deputados, Contribuições Cidadãs pelo e-Democracia e Projeto Final enviado ao Senado Federal. Foi constatado neste estudo que as consultas públicas online podem ser consideradas um ambiente em que a e-participation se realiza, contudo, ainda existem limites e desafios para que esta participação ocorra devido a problemas gerenciais destas ferramentas de participação cidadã online e de outros problemas externos os quais literatura específica aborda e são retratadas na revisão de literatura e ressaltados nas considerações finais deste trabalho. As conclusões indicam que há evidências de que a participação cidadã tem impactos na produção colaborativa de legislações no governo federal, contudo, elas estão condicionadas a uma série de processos e condutas das áreas política, cultural, de recursos e de tecnologia. / With the introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in government, in particular the Internet, it became possible not only to expand the capacity and quality levels of services, but also focus on transparency, leading to several changes within the social control and citizen participation. This new perspective on ICT use in governments for the purpose of expanding participation channels is known as electronic governance (e-governance). The objective of this dissertation is to identify the impacts of citizen participation in public online consultations for the production of laws and limits and challenges of public online consultations of federal legislative power. The instruments of data collection were the structured visit website of the online public consultation, the e-Democracy, and semi-structured interviews of managers responsible for public consultation, as well as representatives involved in drafting the Law on Lan Houses and joined her. Also interviewed were participants of the public consultation and the association of Internet cafes in Brazil. Secondly, there will be a documentary analysis of contributions to see what the main changes from the pre-project in relation to the final design in order to measure the impact of citizen participation by counting the 10 most frequently used words in each document area; Legislative Proposals Members, Citizens Contributions on e-Democracy and Final Project sent to Federal Senate. It is believed that public consultations are an online environment that can be performed e-participation, however, there are still limits and challenges to which this participation occurs due to management problems of these tools for citizen participation online and other external problems which addresses the specific literature and are portrayed in the literature review. The findings indicate that there is evidence that citizen participation has impacts on collaborative production of laws in the federal government, however, it is believed that they are conditioned to a number of dimensions as politics, culture, resources and technology.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

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Through the late 20th century, global society experienced waves of unprecedented political and institutional change, but Australia came to be identified as "constitutionally speaking... the frozen continent", unable or unprepared to comprehensively modernise its own fundamental laws (Sawer 1967). This thesis opens up a subject basic to, but largely unexplored in debate about constitutional change: the territorial foundations of Australian constitutional thought. Our conventional conclusions about territory are first, that Australia's federal system has settled around a 'natural' and presumably final territorial structure; and second, that this is because any federal system such as possessed by Australia since 1901 is more decentralised and therefore more suitable than any 'unitary' one. With federalism coming back into vogue internationally, we have no reason to believe our present structure is not already the best. Reviewing the concepts of territory underpinning colonial and federal political thought from 1815 to the present day, this thesis presents a new territorial story revealing both these conclusions to be flawed. For most of its history, Australian political experience has been based around a richer, more complex and still evolving range of territorial ideas. Federalism is fundamental to our political values, but Australians have known more types of federalism, emerging differently in time and place, than we customarily admit. Unitary values have supplied important symbols of centralisation, but for most of our history have also sought to supply far less centralised models of political institutions than those of our current federal experience. Since the 1930s, in addition to underutilising both federal and unitary lines of imported constitutional theory, Australian politics has underestimated the extent to which our institutional treatment of territory has itself become unique. Despite its recent fall from constitutional discourse, territory is also again on the rise. While political debate has been poorly placed to see it, Australia has experienced a recent resurgence in ideas about territorial reform, offering the promise of a better understanding of the full complexity of our constitutional theory and a new 'unfreezing' of the assumption that territorially, Australia will never change. This thesis seeks to inform these vital new debates.

This study examines ways in which Australian governments, at national and state level, have developed policy responses to the issue of regional service delivery in the post new public management environment. It argues that new public management has changed many institutional arrangements in Australia and led to new public policy approaches based on those reforms. The study compares the approaches taken by federal and state governments in determining service levels for regional communities. The period under consideration is 1996-2001, coinciding first with the election of new NSW and federal governments and their subsequent re-election. Four cases studies are used to analyse a range of activities designed to provide services at local and regional levels, identifying key indicators of policy successes based on coordinated and integrated regional services combined with technology-based solutions that can be adapted to local community needs. The research draws on new governance theory and principles of effective coordination to propose a new model for determining appropriate service delivery. This model highlights the importance of local participation in decision-making, a regional planning focus, social and environmental sustainability, and the engagement of local communities as key determinants of regional policy success.

Public policies are, at once, the means for articulation of political philosophies and processes, the conduits for conversion of political and bureaucratic decisions into actions and the means by which the electorate can assess government performance. Public policy processes offer a means of achieving social and economic change and they are a primary justification for the existence of governmental systems. On these counts, identification of the elements of policy processes and the ways they interact with each other is essential to an understanding of the relationships between public policy decisions, systems of democratic government and their connections with wider society. This thesis goes behind the facade of public policy outcomes and analyses the processes involved in arriving at policy decisions. Linkages are traced between political theories, the processes of public policy decisions and final policy outcomes. This involves, first, an examination and critique of liberal-democratic theories. Second, there is detailed examination of pluralist democratic practice, which is the prevailing political paradigm of modern western liberal-democratic societies. The analysis finds substantial evidence of gross distortions in the process relative to normative theories. Plain causes are the institutionalisation of special interests to the exclusion of wider public interests and inadequate accountability of governments and bureaucracies for their actions. Policy processes in pluralist systems are examined and it is concluded that the social environment, institutional influences and factors which affect the behaviour of institutions are key elements explaining public policy decisions. The capacity for pluralism to significantly influence policy outcomes depends largely on the degree and nature of access to the public policy process at various points. In examining the role of government institutions in public policy processes, it is argued that a clear distinction between the elected legislature and the administrative bureaucracy is artificial and misleading. Further, there is evidence that public service bureaucrats can become captives of their particular client groups and, thus, less accessible to the full range of relevant interests. These problems are exacerbated by the two-party Westminster model of representative democracy which tends to concentrate power in cabinet government, resulting in a decline in the importance of parliament as a deliberative and scrutinising bodies. This dissertation develops the view that there are significant causal links between institutional philosophies and values and the dominant disciplines within institutions. It is also argued that growing professionalism in bureaucracies and a tendency for functional divisions of public policy to be in broad symmetry with the divisions of the professions, tends to intensify the influence of particular professional disciplines on related areas of public policy. The critique of liberal-democratic theories and the related discussion of factors affecting policy processes in a pluralist system are used to identify the essential elements of public policy processes. It is proposed that all policy processes contain the four elements of pluralism, access, accountability and planning which are interactively related. Differences in emphasis given to these elements in the policy process explains the nature of individual policy decisions. Thus, the normative policy process datum model provides both a static and dynamic framework for analysing policy decisions. In order to examine the theoretical arguments in an empirical context, the policy processes of the Australian Federal Government, in the area of industry assistance, are analysed. This policy arena contains all the 'raw material' of pluralist processes and is, therefore, a fertile area for analysis. Furthermore, operating within this policy arena is the Industries Assistance Commission [IAC], a bureaucratic institution which is quite unlike traditional administrative structures. The IAC has, prima-facie, all of the features of the policy process datum model; it operates in an open mode, it encourages a range of pluralistic inputs, it has a highly professional planning function and, because its policy advice is published, it encourages scrutiny and accountability of itself, other actors in the bureaucracy and the elected government. The IAC operates in a rational-comprehensive mode. The analysis concludes that the IAC was established in part to be a countervailing force to restore some balance in the industry policy arena. In this it has been partly successful - the distributive policy decisions of governments have come under much greater scrutiny than in the past and other areas of the bureaucracy have been forced to operate more frequently in a rational-comprehensive mode, rather than as advocates of sectional interests. The IAC has itself limited its range of objectives, however, and has tended to become a computational organisation, isolating its core economic [planning] technology from the interactive processes of the policy process model, i.e. pluralism, access and accountability. By protecting its essential philosophy in this way, the IAC runs the risk of becoming less influential in the overall policy process. Using the policy process model as a datum, and the empirical experience of the IAC and the policy arena in which it operates, several options for administrative reform are examined. A summary agenda for administrative change is proposed which revolves around ways of achieving balanced pluralistic inputs, a greater degree of access, better bureaucratic and government accountability and ways of exploiting but controlling technocratic planning expertise. Emphasis is placed on the need to achieve enriched interactive flows between each of these key elements. If these conditions can be met, it is proposed that a revised and improved administrative bureaucracy will emerge.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität der Bundeswehr, München, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-264).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-171). Also available on the Internet.