Implementation of cash transfer programs: The role of street-level bureaucrats

Conditional cash transfer programs entered the Brazilian political agenda in the 1990s and since then have propagated in the three spheres of government. With the creation of the national program Bolsa Família (BF), in 2003, concerned states and municipalities that already had similar initiatives could be connected to the federal program in at least two ways: integration of programs with the increase of benefit and coverage and/or offering complementary activities to beneficiary families. 

The objective of this paper is to analyze how programs of different levels of government are articulated at the local level, that is, to identify in practice if there are and what are the possibilities of interaction between local cash transfer programs and BF and how they may affect the way these policies reach the citizen. Besides BF, other two family directed programs that exist in São Paulo city and are implemented by the local government are analyzed: Renda Mínima, municipal, established in 2001, and Renda Cidadã, from the state government, in force since 2002. Despite sharing goals and strategies, these three policies have variations, especially in per capita income cut-offs and the value of benefits. In addition, today, opposing parties are the decision makers of each one of them.

Because the street-level bureaucrats are the agents responsible for ensuring that these three essentially competitive policies reach the citizen and, regardless of institutional partnerships, can articulate them in their own way, it is essential to examine carefully the moment of the implementation of these programs. The field research found that these bureaucrats take advantage of the small space of decision that remain available to them and use not only institutional rules but their local and private expertise to implement the programs, providing them with a very reasonable “integrated” format unforeseen by policymakers and local managers.