Capacidades estatais para o desenvolvimento rural no Brasil: análise das políticas públicas para a agricultura familiar

Abstract

The paper analyzes the state capacities built for rural development and family farming in Brazil. In order to do so, the paper analyses the process of construction of three public policies (Pronaf, PNPB and PAA) and the capacity of the Stare to promote, implement and support them over the years. We understand that the state capacities created for rural development in the Brazilian State result of the processes of redemocratization and political decentralization in the 1980s that allowed the formation of institutional arrangements that expanded the interaction between government, state bureaucracy and organized civil society. This interaction, coupled with the establishment of a center-left government in the 2000s, allowed the creation of a political-institutional environment conducive to the formation of a political body and a bureaucracy that have placed family agriculture and rural development on the political agenda and have established state capacities to promote them. These state capacities, oriented toward historically marginalized segments of the population, however, are conditioned by the macro--political-institutional environment and by the unequal power relations historically established in the Brazilian countryside.