New actors in educational policies: The Public Prose cutor’s Office and the Court of Audit

Abstract

The article examines the role of the Public Prosecution Service and the Court of Auditors of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the national policy of early childhood education, especially regarding the expansion of enrollments in public schools. The analytical axes, researched through documents and interviews with prosecutors, auditors, and public managers, contemplate the characteristics of their performance, the institutional changes and the interaction between both institutions. The results show that those are more than simple monitoring agencies, because they influence directly the public policies of early childhood education, acting like co-managers (Hoffmann and Bentes 2008) or fixers (Bardach 1977; Sabatier and Mazmanian 1993; Weimer e Vining 2017) of its implementation in the municipalities. It was also found that these accountability institutions have taken on new roles in the area of education since the 2000s, within an incremental development path (Mahoney e Thelen 2009), marked by a variety of actions that included inter institutional cooperation.