Institutionalized popular participation: the institutional design of the councils of São Paulo's health technical supervision units

• Grant number: 15/09668-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2015
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law - Public Law
• Principal Investigator: Diogo Rosenthal Coutinho
• Grantee: Henrique Almeida de Castro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Direito (FD). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project proposes the execution of an undergraduate research aimed at analyzing the participatory health councils of the sub-prefectures of the city of São Paulo with a focus on their institutional design. It adopts the following question as its guiding line: what are the rules and procedures that structure the functioning of the participatory health councils of the sub-prefectures of the city of São Paulo, and how do the different existing institutional designs among them affect their democratic and inclusive potentials? This research project is structured on the premise that there is a need to analyze concrete participatory experiences. The network of participatory health councils of the city of São Paulo has a number of unique characteristics that justify its choice as the project's scope delimitation, in particular its decentralized structure and its long institutionalization process, which predates Brazil's return to democracy and the 1988 Constitution. The research, in this context, is a reaction to the lack of discussion concerning the institutionalization of popular participation among Brazilian law scholars, which have kept distance to the subject despite its increasing relevance in other academic communities and their own potential of bringing unique contributions to the debate.