In this interview, Fernando Sampaio discusses the evolution of the Brazilian beef industry and the widening application of sustainability initiatives. He recounts how the dominant Brazilian meat packers emerged from a land occupation movement and grew with increased government investment in the 1960s. Sampaio also emphasizes that traceability has been an issue in the industry since the 2000s due to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. He explains the role of the Animal Transit Guide in addressing the problem and anticipates that the implementation of the Agricultural and Livestock Management Platform, a newly integrated database, will further improve transparency. Sampaio then reflects on the impact of the Brazilian Roundtable on Sustainable Livestock, the “Slaughtering the Amazon” campaign by Greenpeace, and the consequent lawsuit against meat packers in 2009. Finally, he reviews the challenges associated with improving transparency and sustainability, from increasing communication between the public and private sector to enforcing compliance with the forest code.
At the time of the interview, Fernando Sampaio was leaving his position as the executive director of the Association of Brazilian Beef Exporters to become the director of the “Produce, Conserve, and Include” strategy committee in the state of Mato Grosso. Before leading the beef exporters’ group, Sampaio worked for Zandbergen, a Dutch beef distributor, from 2001 to 2008. He also worked in the French beef industry for a short time before moving to the Netherlands. He received a bachelor’s degree in agronomic engineering in 1997 from the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, a unit of the University of São Paulo.
In this interview, Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto talks about his role in introducing a sustainable cattle certification scheme in Brazil. He begins by discussing why the development of a cattle certification program was central to Imaflora’s (The Institute of Agricultural and Forest Management and Certification) forest conservation mission. He explains the challenges that Imaflora faced in convincing cattle ranchers of the benefits of certification. He articulates the critical difficulties in setting acceptable sustainability standards that balanced minimization of a deforestation risk with developing a critical mass of certified beef. He discusses the reasons for the limited success of the certification scheme. He concludes by asserting that an increase in beef certification could be achieved through increased consumer demand for certification from cattle producers.
At the time of this interview, Luis Fernando Guedes Pinto was the manager of agriculture certification at Imaflora. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the implementation of Sustainable Agriculture Network certification in Brazil as well as for participating in research partnerships with local universities and research institutions. He joined Imaflora in 1996 and served as executive director from 2005 to 2010. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1993 and a Ph.D. in crop sciences in 2003 from the University of São Paulo.
In this interview, Rodrigo Nascimento describes his role as architect and financial manager for the conversion and reorganization of Integrated Urban Service Units (PSIU) to Integrated Citizen Assistance Units (UAI) in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais since 2007. Upon his appointment to the team organized by Fernanda Girão to improve the PSIU, Nascimento took an active role in redesigning the infrastructure of the dilapidated units. He speaks about the culture of resistance to change embedded in the state that he and the team had to oppose to realize the goal of creating UAI to serve the citizens of Minas Gerais. Nascimento also outlines the state’s partnership with a semi-autonomous company, MGS, that is employed to fix and maintain the UAI, citing the increased efficiency of the company over state management, but also lauding the creativity and innovation of the state in bringing new tools to promote progress and efficiency in UAI even further. Finally, Nascimento comments on the PPP model employed at six units in Minas Gerais, and the goal of moving towards preventative, rather than responsive, upkeep of UAI units. The ultimate target, Nascimento outlines, is to make the UAI in Minas Gerais the best in the state for the service of citizens. He describes how involvement in converting the PSIU to UAI has been a fulfilling experience professionally and personally.
Key terms: Integrated Citizen Assistance Units (UAI), Integrated Urban Service Units (PSIU)
At the time of this interview, Rodrigo Nascimento was serving as Special Coordinator of Expenses for the UAI at the Secretariat for Urban Planning (SEPLAG) for the government of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. He joined the project to convert the Integrated Urban Assistance Units (PSIU) to Integrated Citizen Assistance Units (UAI) in 2007, where he worked first as an architect on designing new infrastructure, and later as a manager of expenses. Prior to his work at SEPLAG, Nascimento worked as an independent professional on several metropolitan projects in the state of Minas Gerais, particularly in the city of Juiz de Fora. Nascimento graduated from the Centro Universitário Metodista de Izabela Hendrix with a degree in architecture.
In this interview, Luciano Evaristo explains the work of IBAMA, focusing on the institute’s monitoring and inspection capabilities. The main thrust of those efforts has been on monitoring both the illegal and legal deforestation of the Amazon rain forest. Evaristo describes the technology and government coordination both in Brazil and transnationally that were required to maximize the efficiency of the monitoring system and ensure results in capturing illegal actors. He also acknowledges the challenges that arose along the way, as well as the many different creative solutions IBAMA was able to come up with each time in response. Toward the end of the interview, Evaristo takes interviewer Rachel Jackson on a step-by-step mock investigation of a deforestation violation to point out how the new monitoring technology serves to geographically locate the offense, determine its nature and magnitude, identify the person in the system, and immediately issue a fine and/or conduct an arrest on the spot.
At the time of this interview, Luciano de Meneses Evaristo was director of the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). Previously, he had been with IBAMA in the department of strategic management as well as in the area of environmental monitoring. In addition, Evaristo served as head of the department of environmental protection at various times from 2002 to 2012. He also was in the Brazilian government’s internal affairs office on combatting corruption.
Ciro Fernandes recounts his experience in Bresser-Pereira's team in the Ministry of Administration and State Reform. The initial reform team was recruited from pools in the larger civil service bureaucracy, the Secretariat for Federal Administration that served as immediate basis for the Ministry, and Bresser-Pereira's university network. The first mandate under President Cardoso focused on articulation of specific goals for the reform program, including (i) decentralization of public administration, especially for service delivery; (ii) development of performance indicators with support from international consultants; (iii) reform of the hiring process for civil servants; and (iv) strengthening of the civil service core through enhanced recruitment strategies. Fernandes identifies the reform blueprint of Plano Diretor as the most significant product of the reform inasmuch as the ideas contained therein have served as bases for a long-lasting revolution in thinking about public administration. Under Fernandes' direction, there was a coordinated and three-pronged media outreach strategy predicated on (i) a magazine targeting a wide audience of practitioners, (ii) a collection of papers for specialists who may be interested in replicating the reform, and (iii) a website in a decade when the potential of the internet remained largely untapped. Due to this visibility, Bresser succeeded in putting civil service at the top of the agenda of the reform-focused Cardoso administration. However, during the second mandate there were significant challenges to implementation. The main sources of resistance were civil service unions and specific advisers in the executive and legislative branches who identified managerial reform with the neoliberalism they denounced. Fernandes discusses specific implementation challenges in decentralization through creation of state-funded, administratively autonomous social organizations, as well as through creation of executive agencies. In both cases, the difficulties in establishing pilots and managing anxiety among the personnel contributed to limited successes. In this climate, the Ministry was ultimately absorbed by the Ministry of Planning. The resulting discontinuity among the key reform managers frustrated successful implementation of the reform at the federal level. Nonetheless, the dispersion of the reform team resulted in further dissemination of the key ideas of the Plano Diretor as the reform staff was incorporated into other teams at the state level.
A career civil servant, Ciro Fernandes worked as a project manager for the Ministry of Social Security. He joined the newly-created Ministry of Administration and State Reform under Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira places his own public management reform of the 1990s in the context of past civil service reforms carried out during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s and later on under the military regime in the 1960s. Upon being appointed as Minister of Federal Administration and Reform, he articulated his ideas in a white paper on reform of the state apparatus (Plano Diretor) influenced by the British experience in managerial reform. To coordinate implementation, Bresser-Pereira built a reform team by recruiting his former students and the public managers (gestores) trained in the then-neglected competitive public service career. The former minister’s approach to reform focuses on deemphasizing procedure in favor of accountability for outcomes, and on definition of goals to be pursued freely by managers as opposed to close supervision and auditing at each step. He draws a distinction between the strategic core of the state tasked with policy-making, and the state agencies tasked with regulation and execution of specific activities, which would benefit greatly from adoption of a managerial model and greater autonomy. To strengthen the strategic core of the state, Bresser-Pereira reformed the entrance system for careers in public service by holding regular public examinations open to university graduates. To further improve efficiency, he advocated for tenure flexibilization in civil service and for reduction of services provided directly by the state. In his vision, the nonprofit sector (social organizations) would be primarily responsible for a significant portion of service provision under renewable government contracts, as illustrated in the cases of healthcare and higher education. As these controversial measures ignited public opinion, managerial reform was successfully put on the agenda. The main sources of opposition were the lower bureaucracy, professors and university employees, members of the PartidoDos Trabalhadores (PT), administrative lawyers and the judiciary. Bresser-Pereira’s approach to overcoming resistance was to encourage debate in several fora and garner the support of state governments, municipalities, the majority of congress and the media. The former minister highlights two important achievements: winning the hearts and minds of the higher bureaucracy, and successful passage of an amendment that enshrined the principles of the reform in the Constitution. After his tenure, he advocated for increasing the budgetary power of the reform initiative by placing it under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Planning. However, in the face of limited political will of the relevant ministers, the program was effectively lowered to the status of secretary without increasing its operational capabilities. Nonetheless, the principles of the reform have been adopted throughout Brazil at different levels, most notably in the state of Minas Gerais.
At the time of this interview, Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira was serving as president for the Centro de Economía Política (Center for Political Economics) and editor of the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy. After training as a lawyer at the University of São Paulo, Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira received his master’s degree in business administration from Michigan State University and joined the faculty of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. After serving as vice-president of the Pão de Açúcar Group for almost twenty years, he became president of the São Paulo state bank under its first democratically-elected administration, later serving as chief of staff of the governor. Bresser-Pereira served as finance minister of Brazil at the end of the José Sarney administration. During Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s first term, he was minister of federal administration and state reform. Following Cardoso’s reelection, he became minister of science and technology.
In this interview, Dr. Luiz Eduardo Soares discusses police criminality, particularly extrajudicial killings, armed invasions, tortures and disrespect towards the poor, and the ideological and political barriers to police reform in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Initially, he describes the process of reforming Brazil’s state institutions during its transition out of a dictatorship. He addresses issues of political polarization and building consensus around reform projects, institutional disorganization, and community policing. Dr. Soares explains the successes of the UPP (Unidade Pacificadora da Policia) program and the GPAE (Grupamento de Policiamento em Areas Especiais) program in establishing secure neighborhoods and rooting out police corruption. In order to scale up the successes of the experimental peace policing initiatives in several of the favelas, Dr. Soares asserts the need for major institutional reform within the police, which would require significant political support. He also stresses the importance of empirical research methods to address social problems.
At the time of this interview Dr. Luiz Eduardo Soares was the Secretary of Municipal Valuation of Life and Prevention of Nova Iguacu, Rio de Janeiro. He has served in numerous government positions dealing with issues of policing and public safety and in academic positions at various prestigious universities. After completing his Ph.D in Sociology and Political Science and researching and teaching for 15 years at IUPERJ (University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro), Dr. Soares was appointed to a research position in security policy at ISER (Instituto de Estudos da Religião). In 2003, Dr. Soares became National Secretary of Public Security for Rio de Janeiro. Since occupying this position, he has overseen the implementation of internal police reform programs, such as the UPP and GPAE.
Ana Toni discusses the Ford Foundation’s involvement in providing a forum for academia, civil society, the public sector, the private sector and the media to exchange ideas and research on policies such as the Pacifier Police Units (Unidade Pacificadora da Policia, UPP) and to more generally fight criminality in the favelas of Brazil. Toni focuses on the importance of comparative research and empirical methods in public security and community policing. She explains that the success of the UPPs hinged on community integration and leadership, a multidisciplinary approach, academic engagement in public security studies, and replacing political positioning with professional expertise. Finally, Toni discusses how the Ford Foundation gives marginalized peoples in Brazil a voice on social justice issues.
From 2003-2011, Ana Toni was the representative of Brazil at the Ford Foundation, which works to help change structures and policies that increase inequality and social marginalization, in Rio de Janeiro. Previously, Toni served as the Country Director of ActionAid Brazil. She earned her master’s degree in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
João Piquet Carneiro traces the origins of the Code of Conduct to the work of the Council of State Reform convened under President Fernando Cardoso. After a first draft of the code was completed, the Public Ethics Commission was created by presidential decree with a mandate to clarify gray areas in the duties of senior officials of the executive branch. Piquet discusses the commission’s political autonomy, its functions that notably excluded any role in coercion or discipline, and its deliberation style that favored unanimity. He describes the Code of Conduct as a set of general rules mostly concerned with detection and prevention of conflict of interest, which he defines as any activity that may be incompatible with the attributions of public function. The challenges of initial implementation mainly arose from the code becoming effective mid-administration, thus affecting officials who had already been appointed. Consequently, the code was not enacted into law, due to the commission’s perception that a) moral commitments are intrinsically more effective than legal ones, b) voluntary adherence would be easier to implement than forced compliance, c) casting the code as a tool to protect officials from trouble resulting from involuntary transgression rather than as a punitive tool would decrease resistance, and d) the long-lasting impact of the code would come from internal respect garnered over time rather than policing, which would need to be perpetual. Piquet describes successful efforts by the commission to avoid centralization and foster adoption of internal codes of conduct throughout government agencies. He then discusses the Confidential Declaration of Information, in which public officials disclosed details of their wealth and possible conflicts of interest. He emphasizes its evidentiary role and its contribution to the specificity of the Code of Conduct, which was continually updated through resolutions. The consistent obstacle he identifies has to do with the small budget allocated to the commission. Nonetheless, each administration entailed new challenges. The Cardoso administration addressed the difficulties of initial implementation, which were resolved when compliance with the Code of Conduct became a precondition for taking office. Under President Lula da Silva, the commission's purview was partially restricted because the president often did not endorse commission recommendations. Piquet notes that lawyers are heavily represented in the current commission, which has led to a drift toward a more formalistic and legal approach to public ethics, with growing emphasis on due-process provisions.
At the time of this interview, João Geraldo Piquet Carneiro was the chairman of the Hélio Beltrão Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the improvement of public administration. Piquet started his career as a lawyer. As an economics law professor he became interested in the operation, control and efficiency of governmental bodies. From 1979 to 1985 he served in the national program of debureaucratization, starting as legal council and eventually assuming the post of Special Minister when the incumbent left to take another office. In the 1990s, Piquet served as an adviser to the Deregulation Committee of the Presidency convened under the Fernando Collor administration, which constantly posed ethical questions in connection to corruption related to excessive regulation. In 1991 he returned to government to participate in the State Council on Reform created by President Fernando Cardoso. As a result of the council’s recommendations for improvement of ethical conduct in public service, the Public Ethics Commission was created in 1999. Piquet Carneiro served as its chairman from its inception until 2004.
Humberto Falcao Martins offers his perspective on the Brazilian civil service reforms of the 1990s. He credits Bresser-Pereira for single-handedly putting civil service reform on the agenda. As a specialist on state an institutional issues in the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs, he was involved in the initial review of the Plano Diretor, or blueprint for reform, produced by Bresser-Pereira. Martins says he was impressed with the decentralization scheme that would create a strategic core, a second group of activities handled exclusively by the state, a third group that would perform activities through partnerships with NGOs and social organizations, and a fourth group focused on market-oriented service provision by state-owned agencies. Although he recognized the potential of the proposed initiatives, Martins was concerned with reduction of political interference in the implementation stage. He identifies economists in the government as one of the main sources of opposition, which translated into generalized resistance to the reform. Divergent views on managerial reform within the executive branch also contributed to resistance. Martins further argues that consensus building during the drafting process would have circumvented opposition within the civil service. Operational and legal obstacles plagued the implementation stage as well, but were somewhat successfully addressed in the social organization initiative in which Martins participated personally. Specific strategies involved passage of constitutional amendments to restructure the civil service, but they came at the cost of increasing opposition. Martins emphasizes the role of the reform in bringing about a paradigm shift in public administration rather than in effecting specific change. In that sense, the ultimate result of the Brazilian managerial reform was to inspire other reformers across the country, with the state of Minas Gerais emerging as a paradigmatic success. In the end, Martins attributes failure of specific implementation to fragmentation arising from concomitant and somewhat divergent views on state reform that were happening at the same time under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
At the time of this interview, Humberto Falcao Martins was the managing director of the Instituto Publix, which focuses on consulting and corporate education in public management. He served as a specialist on state institutional issues in the Secretariat for Strategic Affairs under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and he reviewed initial proposals for national reform. Inspired by the potential of the Plano Diretor, he joined the Ministry of Administration and State Reform himself as a member of the social organizations team.