The Second Dimension Of Mds’ Learning Involved The Restructuring Of The Policy’s Implementation Procedures

By Author: doris zhang
Total Articles: 76
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CGU’s analyses on policy implementation in municipalities are sent to the corresponding Min istry, so that it can the usually necessary measures regarding adjustments in regulations and correcting problems, frauds or inefficiency. CGU’s reports on inspecting federal policies in municipalities are published in CGU’s website and constitutes one of the first Brazilian experiences of public disclosure of federal government activities with great repercussion in the media and among those involved . Actually, disclosing the reports was part of the inspection program’s own strategy. Its purpose was not only to publish state actions, but also to generate among the unselected/uninspected municipalities a willingness to manage federal funds with more efficiency and probity, in face of their apprehension at becoming the object of inspection activities. In any case,personal whiteboards disclosing such reports bears fruit such as transparency and generation of information that is relevant from the point of view of social control and from the point ...
... of view of scientific knowledge 4 . Finally, it is important to note that the information generated in these CGU inspections had never been produced, in most cases, even for the Ministries that implement the inspected federal policies, since most of them do not have a system for monitoring their own policies. This is the case of the Ministry of Social Development, which is in charge, as mentioned, for implementing the federal governments social welfare policy and has as one of its goals to restructure social welfare policy in states and municipalities. It does this by means of regulating welfare actions and transfer of resources for such actions to be carried out by municipal public agents or private agents hired by the municipalities. The exchange between the MDS’s National Secretariat for Social Welfare and CGU began in 2004, when the basic rules for the Unified Social Welfare System were being prepared.

SUAS articulates means, efforts and resources to execute social welfare programs, services and benefits, thus organizing the supply of social welfare in all of Brazil, promoting social protection and well-being to families, children, teenagers and youths, people with disabilities, senior citizens—in short, to all who need it. One of SUAS’ main regulations are the Basic Operational Rules , which govern the System’s decentralized administration, the relationship between the three government levels and how public resources are applied. Since SUAS was a new and recently implemented policy, CGU began to require that the Ministry send the program’s more detailed regulations, based on which it would inspect the municipalities. In such monitoring processes, meetings are required between CGU analysts and managers from the Ministries in charge of the inspected program, mainly in two moments: the first occurs before the municipalities are inspected so that CGU can learn the characteristics of the policy as designed by the Ministry. The second moment of interaction between CGU and the Ministry occurs after inspection and involves the Ministry’s validation of the report prepared by CGU. In this second phase, discussions are often deeper and more conflicted, for they involve defining the recommendations the Ministry must follow to correct the program’s gaps and inefficiencies found by CGU’s inspection. Since CGU annually holds new lotteries and inspects new municipalities , the recommendations of the previous year’s report and whether or not they were implemented are discussed each year, which is another source of potential divergence between the Ministry and CGU. In the case of SUAS, the relationship between CGU and the Ministry became a quite close “two-way street”: it meant learning for both CGU analysts and SNAS managers. This sort of relationship is very rare, for in most cases the Ministry is deeply resisting of the recommendations put forth by the controlling agency and the latter is reluctant to alter its internal auditing processes to the programs’ particulars. The interactions between CGU and SNAS generated mutual efforts to understand the demands and form of working of each institution, allowing for organizational changes especially in MDS. CGU analysts demanded that SNAS prepare regulations on the program’s specifics and service production indicators so that they could inspect the municipalities.

This required SNAS to seek qualification to produce the information and to create a specific team to deal with matters and proceedings related to inspection. This team is occupied with receiving and centralizing the demands of the controlling agencies , distributing them within the Ministry to prepare the response, collecting information from the municipalities about the problems identified in the inspection and responding to the controlling agencies. SNAS, on the other hand, demanded that CGU analysts understand the SUAS specifics and the new logic of rendering social welfare services and consequently accepted new forms of service inspection. It arose from practical experience, by means of building room for dialogue in the inspection process, greater in scope than that set forth in the rules. Although there are mandatory meetings to be held between the CGU and Ministry teams, in the SUAS case this required greater mutual willingness and understanding. And it depended not only on holding the joint meetings foreseen in the rules, but also on building a relationship of mutual understanding over the years. This relationship was not set forth in the formal rules, and its creation and effectiveness relied on the reciprocal will and willingness of the actors involved. Through such a dialogue, a reciprocal organizational learning process can be experienced: the auditors learned about the SUAS regulations and parameters, which are different from those established in other social policies; on the other hand, the managers learned more about their own policy in their effort to present the program’s logic and characteristics and justify their choices before the CGU analysts. The analysts’ learning occurred in single-loop, in that they did not review their working procedures and rules, but merely took the policy’s specifics and the structure of the Ministry in question into consideration in the inspection process. Although they spent more time in the SNAS audit than usual, this did not entail revising their working procedures or instruments. The MDS managers’ learning, on the other hand, occurred in double-loop, and may be described in three dimensions: creating regulations, restructuring procedures for policy implementation and organizational restructuring. Let us look at each of these learnings more closely. MDS’ first learning dimension—the creation of SUAS regulations by SNAS—ensued in good part from CGU’s demands for more detailed rules about the program’s execution, in order to inspect it in the municipalities. In this way, CGU forced the Secretariat to define regulations with greater speed than it thought necessary. MDS interviewees reported that they always perceived CGU as very interested, requiring information on the program’s functioning to be able to perform the monitoring in the field and reading the Ministry’s documents to be able to guide municipalities in implementing the new policy. Naturally, CGU’s attribution of requiring that the program rules be clearly defined was initially felt as an encumbrance by the managers, for it demanded that they respond in a time frame that was different from the one defined or desired by the managers.One factor mentioned by the interviewees for the good relationship in this process was maintaining the same leader in the CGU team of analysts during all years of the program’s closer inspection, thus ensuring that the knowledge accumulated during the learning process was not lost.

As CGU pointed out problems in SUAS implementation in municipalities, SNAS had to revise the regulations and the incentive and control mechanisms over the municipal executive powers. Since most Brazilian Ministries do not have their own systems of monitoring and evaluation, the information produced by CGU in monitoring the municipalities are essential for the Ministries that implement programs in a decentralized manner to know what happens at the other end of the system. These requirements initially caused a good deal of stress at SNAS, for it needed to interrupt its working routine to prepare responses to CGU’s demands. Over time, the managers realized that CGU’s demands brought MDS important information about the program’s execution that would otherwise not reach the Ministry. In this way, they began to see that the information produced by the CGU audits helped MDS to have a general view of the policy’s functioning and of its problems on a national scale, and therefore helped the Ministry to improve the program’s management quality. In addition, since CGU analysts are “external” agents for the Ministry and therefore have an “outside” view, they can help the managers to identify gaps not foreseen by the policymakers. This difference in perspectives may generate many divergences and some conflict between analysts and managers, but it can also be a source of mutual learning. This occurred in the issue of local level government corruption and the Ministry’s responsibility for controlling the municipalities that receive transfers. Initially, the managers thought that CGU analysts worried far too much about frauds. Indeed, CGU analysts are biased to identify gaps and errors,desktop white board while managers prioritize the policy’s functioning, assuming those involved will adhere to legal principles and regulations. As reported by an MDS interviewee, however, it was only after the CGU inspections that he realized the “municipalities are not always honest”. This means that the Ministry must indeed worry about irregularities that may occur in the program’s execution. Creating a new and well-meaning policy is not enough; there is also need for monitoring, control and punishment mechanisms. This generated a clear perception on the part of the managers of the importance of CGU’s work, thus changing their initial standing on the agency’s work. This relevance occurs not only in identifying and correcting irregularities, but also contributes to improve the policy’s quality at the Ministry, state and municipal levels.