Colegiados nacionais de políticas públicas em contexto de mudanças

Public policy collegiate bodies - including councils, commissions, and committees, among others - are a present reality in Brazilian public administration. This paper aims to study and describe the structure and functioning of teams for technical support to public policy collegiate bodies, meaning the group of public servants whose direct functions are providing support to such bodies, in order to accomplish their mandates. Considering the challenges of comparability and the idiosyncrasies of Brazilian political scenario for the last two years, technical visits and semi structured interviews were performed over 28 national collegiate bodies from August, 18, to October, 3rd, in 2016. Information collected points out that those collegiate bodies faced, during impeachment of ex-President Dilma Rousseff, in 2016, complex and heterogeneous situations, pressed by changes and uncertainty. The drastic agenda of cuts of expenditures, by the Executive Branch, in the name of a fiscal balance, and the low offer of human resources remain as critical points. Despite this unfavorable scenario, the quantity and quality of activities performed by the collegiate bodies are remarkable. This apparent contradiction suggests that those bodies are adapting to the circumstances, using strategies as the intense dependency from overwork and additional effort from the teams for technical support. However, recent cases show that claims for "agility" and "efficiency" are being used as formal motivation to extinction of those spaces. More than deactivation, the national collegiate bodies are under risk of historical deconstruction.