Political Arrangements of "Minha Casa Minha Vida" Program - the Role of State, Civil Construction Sector and Civil Society

Historically there is a functional relationship between the development of the civil construction productive sector and the brazilian State, with a deep impact in housing policies’ decision-making processes. ‘Minha Casa Minha Vida’ program was an anticyclic measure to face the international economic crisis, supporting that sector and implementing Keynesian investments with macroeconomic effects, having few concerns with housing needs. 

The Federal Government concentrates program’ normative and financing functions, redistributed from the cities/housing ministry to the economic planning ministry and the government’s strategic political decisions agency. Implementation decision power was granted to a public bank which acts guided by productivity goals, regardless housing needs. The constructive sector was already strongly present in the program formulation and influencing the rules to a better reproduction of the sector’s capital, being also a fundamental actor in the implementation, given that it became its main promoter. 

In the case of municipalities – who had almost no influence on MCMV conception – it was assigned a role of appointing the beneficiaries of the first range (low-income families), assuring them, without financial/institutional efforts, the maintenance of electoral mandates through clientelistic relations. Social movements’ participation was limited to a category with only 3% of the budget (but that enables them to deliver actual results to their bases). They also informally participate in the appointing process, amplifying their political gains but with results that drift them away significantly of their struggle against spatial segregation. 

These decision arrangements discourage particularized solutions dialoguing with local needs and represent the State/corporations’ historic imbrication, oriented by the development of construction sector and by its macroeconomic, political and electoral roles. This logic shapes the actual housing policy model and explains housing investments’ decision-making process, apparently deepening territorial inequalities. Then, a pending question is: does this model contribute to or counter inequality in brazilian cities?