Fund-to-fund transfers: federative coordination and cooperation in public security in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to analyze whether fund-to-fund transfers have contributed to federal coordination and cooperation of policies aimed at public security in Brazil. To this end, the work was divided into three stages: (i) Survey of National Public Security Fund amounts allocated to the states and the Federal District in the period from 2000 to 2022, before and after the adoption of fund-to-fund transfers; (ii) Conducting semi-structured interviews to raise the perceptions of managers responsible for preparing and coordinating the decentralization process and monitoring the execution of decentralized resources; and (iii) Analysis of the Coordination/Cooperation mechanisms foreseen in the Application Plans prepared by the states in the period. The research findings confirm the results of previous studies on the induction power of fund-to-fund transfers in the cooperation and coordination of national policies for public security. It was verified that the expansion of resources and the obligatoriness of their sharing with the states favored the alignment of state policies with the guidelines established by the Union but that the interaction between bodies, organizations, and members of society on the subject is still incipient.