Introduction

Policy analysis has been developing worldwide as a branch of political science since the Second World War. At its origins, in both Europe and the US, lie the war effort of the 1940s and the need to rationalise public decisions and action. With time, policy analysis became increasingly independent of its field of origin and consolidated into a distinct object of study. Political science is concerned with subjects directly connected with the field of politics: political theory, institutions and how they operate, political behaviour and ideologies, interest groups, political parties and elections, and so on. Policy studies, meanwhile, are concerned with analysing the policy process and evaluating policies; their field is thus policies. Their distinctive feature is that they are a theoretical and applied field, which assumes some capacity for intervention. Although discussion persists at the theoretical level as to what the public policy studies field is, it always relates to the idea of the identification and solution of social problems by governments.

In Brazil, there is no specific training in policy analysis, although the activities of public managers, consultants, private entities and sectoral specialists have increasingly been furnishing knowledge about how policy options are taken, implemented and evaluated. What we call ‘policy analysis’ is being conducted by professionals in technical and bureaucratic careers in ministries and other government agencies, and is produced in private education, research or advisory institutions.

Although there is empirical production in the public policy field, there is no discussion in Brazil of what policy analysis is or the work of a policy analyst as they appear in the international literature – or, at best, that discussion is only incipient. Policy analysis is defined by the importance given to systematically analysing the development of policy options, and may be performed by both government and non-governmental agents (Weimer and Vinning, 1995; Geva-May and Maslove, 2007; Bardach, 2009).

The activity of policy analysis as understood in Brazil relates first to subjects dear to Brazilian intelligentsia in the 20th century. At that time, intellectuals and academics in several fields devoted their efforts essentially to studying the state and the patterns of its development (Villas Boas, 1991; Loureiro, 1992, 1997; Forjaz, 1997; Melo, 1999; Liedke Filho, 2005; Carvalho, 2007; Jackson, 2007; Souza 2007; Lessa, 2010).