Governance in the Brazilian Federal Public Defenders’ Office

Abstract

The Public Defenders’ Office is responsible for providing access to justice for vulnerable citizens. This agency needs to adopt good governance standards to achieve good performance. Although socially important, governance in this type of organization has been little studied. Aiming to fill that gap, this paper identifies and discusses standards of good governance in the Brazilian Federal Public Defenders’ Office, as well as relationships between its dimensions and variables. The research included 14 in-depth interviews and building and validating a questionnaire to measure the perceptions of governance in that agency. The results show four factors of governance: Control and Accountability, Social Participation, Strategic Resources, and Access to Justice. It was observed that public defenders and administrative staff do not perceive control mechanisms to be part of governance, perceive little or no social participation in decision-making processes, and perceive that some working conditions and actions to develop the Public Defenders’ Office personnel are absent. This study contributes to the advancement of the literature on the administration of justice, proposes a Public Defenders’ Governance Scale, and reflects on the relationship between performance, access to justice and other dimensions of governance. Publisher's note: an incorrect version of this article was previously published at http://doi.org/10.36745/ijca.273