A fragilidade da participação dos stakeholders em políticas públicas de infraestrutura de transportes: a construção da BR-43

Abstract

Considering the importance of public policies to society, it is crucial to note the different reasons why interested parties get involved in these decision-making processes. This research applied the theory of stakeholders aiming to understand how the participation of stakeholders take place in elaborating and implementing public infrastructure policies on road transport in Roraima as well as the factors affecting this issue especially in the construction of BR-432. Although the participation of society in public policy decisions has advanced, the mechanisms and efforts in Brazilian public services focusing this participation still undergo discontinuities, providing some degree of frailty to the decision-making process. These aspects may pull away some actors from the processes of elaboration and implementation of public policies as there are decision-making variations concerning the stability and disruption of public actions in setting priorities. This situation takes place due to factors as succession of parties and composition of forces in the government, aspects such as the motivational and cognitive deficit of citizens, their economic condition, among others. This study seeks to map the politicalinstitutional arrangement related to this decision-making process as a specific objective. The research assures that governmental stakeholders play a major role in the decisions referring the construction of BR-432, since they represent the State and are, in the first instance, responsible for public policies, besides being conveyors of a social contract. Bibliographic survey and text annotation were carried out from March 2018. In mid-2019, unstructured and semi-structured interviews were conducted with open-ended questions, and the interviewer had the chance to deepen a certain topic if necessary, when the work was halted because the interviewer was on a medical leave. The research was restarted in the first half of 2020, and in February the pandemic began leading to social isolation, which prevented from scheduling with potential interviewees. Considering 11 stakeholders, only 5 participated in the semi-structured interview and 6 answered an unstructured interview. It noted that some stakeholders are not identified due to negligence or absence of a more effective policy for identifying stakeholders by project managers or due to the fact that stakeholders do not recognize their attributes. The decisionmaking process could be a more democratic one if the public entity pursues a policy focused on identifying and engaging stakeholders through the development of intrinsic relationships among stakeholders. The relevance of the thesis, in this sense, is to contribute by proposing a new focus on the theme of stakeholder participation in public policy decisions, pointing out the need for reflection on the creation of institutional arrangements that promote the engagement of society. We found that non-participation of society in the decision-making process reduced legitimacy building in the construction of BR-432.