November 5, 2018

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Giovanni Allegretti e Silvia Rodríguez Maeso

Public policy observatories are mechanisms focused on the compilation, production and dissemination of information and knowledge about public policies within a given territory, subject or social segment. For two decades, in different countries, the designation "Observatory" has been used by a wide variety of organizations created by academic, governmental or civil society institutions with the objective of expanding access to information on public actions and democratizing the processes of elaboration and social control of policies. This study understands that democratization entails not only the issue of access to but also more democratic processes of production and circulation of knowledge. Thus, the present research is initiated with an intense empirical fieldwork in public policy observatories of Portugal and Brazil, through the analysis of websites of more than sixty observatories, a set of twenty-three interviews and a case study developed at the Observatory of the Metropolises, linked to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The study is structured from the question about the roles that these arrangements/mechanisms can play in the circulation of knowledge in favour of the democratization of policies. The central hypothesis of this study is that the observatories that provide the encounter between different knowledges about politics are more likely to become a space of connection, conflict and mutual implication and can promote more intensely the coproduction and democratization of the knowledge that informs the policies. Through the analysis of elements such as actors, objectives, available products, strategies and discourses for the construction of legitimacy, the study presents a proposal of a typology of the observatories: Transparency Observatory, Expert Observatory, Visibility Observatory and Intervention Observatory. Each of these types is problematized in a dialogue with different authors' theories about the relationships between different types of knowledge in public action. Ultimately, the thesis advances to the formulation of a new typology, this time centered on types of democratizing practices that can be developed by the various types of public policy observatories.

Keywords: Observatories; public policy; democracy; participation; knowledge