Reformas nos programas sociais brasileiros: solidariedade, pobreza e controle social (1990-2014)

Abstract

The analysis carried out in this work is based on the social process that established the “Bolsa Família” Program (PBF). It was investigated how and for what interests reforms occurred in Brazilian social programs, from the understanding that these were imposed as a substrate to the formulation of that program, as opposed to other forms that existed as political possibilities. The concern surrounding this approach aims to explain how it was possible to advance socially without necessarily changing structuring conceptions around hunger and poverty. These terms were persisted in a context of changes that have occurred in the forms of social life management. In the analyzed period (1990-2014), poverty was elevated to the centrality of actions in social programs, thus made with the appropriation of the meanings of the idea of social solidarity as a project that would carry forward a social-political identity of confrontation, translating it into an expression of political negotiation, social control and conciliation. It is noted, therefore, that such identity assumed different characteristics and roles around the objectives of social mobilization and projection of changes in the economic and political dimensions. From the analysis of the reforms of social programs that occurred in the 2000s, it was possible to show that the uses of social techniques - focalization and conditionalities - as normative for social actions, it displaced the centrality of the idea of work as an element of configuration of the dignity for the notion of well-being linked to food consumption, goods, and conditions of housing, identity, composition and family characteristics. Program reforms were mediated by cultural mechanisms for which moral references for interpretation of the poor and poverty were imposed in order to bring together PBF conceptions as a national program with conceptions of poverty management at the local level. The analysis of this social process allowed to note the political ordering around the understanding and the explanation about such cultural mechanisms that established categories of analysis and understanding of material conditions of life. These, previously, was included in the sphere of the relations of production, however, they were characterized by hunger and poverty in an appeal to social solidarity. In this political conjuncture, the PBF was promoted as an exemplary form of the conditional cash transfer to impoverished Brazilian workers. The research showed that the PBF represented the institutional reorganization of existing social programs at the time of its creation, as a political option made as an adjustment of other possibilities to ordering the social structures and practices.