Elementos de estrutura e governança das parcerias entre o setor público e o setor privado : estudo de caso sobre o Programa Água Para Todos
Resumen
In the past few decades, following the growing trend to create partnerships between
public and private sectors in multiple countries, this topic has been broadly discussed
in global academic production. The main purpose of this research is to identify
potential relationships in those partnerships’ structure, how they are handled, and the
results they aim to achieve. For that matter, this paper presents an overview of the
subject, taking into account the context of emergence and development of those
partnerships in Brazil and in the world, the different terminologies and concepts used
to discuss them, and the multiple possibilities to characterize them. Three aspects
were considered for the characterization, namely: 1) the partnerships’ hardware,
composed by their standards, constitution and objectives – its physical structure; 2)
the partnerships’ software, or how their members relate to one another, to other
actors, to their organizations, to society, and to the public and private systems that
surround them – its governance; and 3) the results aimed by partnerships. The
government program Água Para Todos (APT), one of the measures for the
governmental plan Brasil sem Miséria (BSM) – a strategy by the Federal Government
(2011-2014), which aims to overcome extreme poverty in Brazil – was selected to
approach this theme and to illustrate the rationale behind partnerships between
public and private sectors. In the form of different arrangements to achieve the
objective of making the access to water universal in the Brazilian semi-arid region,
the participation of actors from public and private sectors joining efforts and taking
turns on different roles was critical to assure that the goals established by the
Federal Government were fulfilled and to foster other benefits for the population as
well. It was also possible to observe that the three aspects of partnerships
considered for the analysis affect one another. Just as the partnership’s hardware
affects its governance, any kind of obstacle faced by the form of operation might
result in changes to the previously constituted structural elements. The possibility to
reassess the continuous forms of partnerships’ hardware and software might be one
of the requirements to achieve the best possible results. At the same time, tracking
results along the partnership execution might point to difficulties and bottlenecks
which, occasionally, would act as guides to the required changes to its structure and
governance.