Introduction

The evolution of policy analysis in Brazil followed a different path than the one seen in the US, Canada, UK and other developed countries, evolving independently from the Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition. Up to today, classical authors in the field of policy analysis – such as Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Theodore Lowi, Yehezkel Dror, James March and Johan Olsen, among others – have not been translated into Portuguese. The only exception is Herbert Simon, who had his book Administrative Behavior (Simon, 1972) translated and published in Brazil in 1957 thanks to a cooperation programme between the Brazilian government and the US Agency for International Development (USAID); however, the book is out of print since 1972. Therefore, most policymakers in Brazil did not have contact with the classical books on policy analysis during their academic studies and even later as professionals.

Policy analysis as a specialised field emerged in the early 1950s in the US as a subfield within political science, having as its landmark the publication of the book The policy sciences: recent developments in scope and method (Lerner and Lasswell, 1951). In Brazil, during this same period, intellectual and political attentions were focused on economic development strategies. In this context, the works of the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC/CEPAL) became the main intellectual influence in the formulation of public policies in Brazil and throughout Latin America. One important work of this period was Raúl Prebisch's (1950) essay, The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. Thus, while in the US, policy analysis emerged from political science, in Brazil and in other Latin-American countries, policy analysis meant, above all, the analysis of policies aimed at promoting economic development.

This emphasis on economic development lasted for several decades, until it found its limits in the economic downturn of the late 1970s, a period marked in Brazil by the failure of the Second National Development Plan and by the debt crisis (Carneiro, 2002). The 1980s became known as the ‘lost decade’ due to the long period of recession in Brazil and Latin America that followed the changes in the global economic environment. Throughout the decade, developmentalist policies started to be replaced by macroeconomic adjustment policies, which included privatisation of state companies and financial liberalisation. However, this scenario slowly began to change once again.