Coalitions' Strategies and Resources to Create and Oppose a Curricular Education Reform in Brazil

• In Event: The Implementation of Brazil's Base Nacional Comum Curricular: Promise and Challenge With Brazil's Common Core

Abstract

This paper focuses on the political origins of the BNCC and addresses two fundamental questions. First, how did a national curricular reform became a national priority in Brazil? Second, how have the resources of both advocacy and oppositional groups influenced the BNCC’s design and subsequent approval? The paper begins by presenting the two main theories that guide the analysis: the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and Multiple Streams Theory. Subsequently, the paper describes the political and economic context of Brazil from 2012 through 2017, including a discussion of how the BNCC emerged as a national policy, which actors supported and opposed it, and the arguments put forth by both groups. Finally, we apply the typology of coalition resources from the Advocacy Coalition Framework to analyze the resources that those groups leveraged in their endeavors to influence public policy.

In addition to secondary source analysis, including published articles, books, policy documents and local newspaper articles, this paper benefits from confidential interviews with over 100 people directly involved in Brazilian education policy, conducted between July 2018 and August 2019. The interviewees were members of the Brazilian government (federal, state, and local), institutions that support or oppose the BNCC (e.g., philanthropies, unions, universities, etc.), and school-level professionals. Using the ACF resources typology, our results suggest that the pro-BNCC coalition has considerably more resources at its disposal compared to the coalition that opposes it. Indeed, the pro-BNCC coalition has more formal authority to make policy decisions and better tools to influence public opinion and gain access to information and financial resources. The coalition that opposes the BNCC, however, has an advantage when it comes to “mobilizable troops,” or those who can be easily swayed to engage in political activities. We conclude that the resources of the coalition that advanced the BNCC were fundamental to its policy design and approval.

Overall, this paper yields two important contributions to the literature on policy coalitions. The first is the analysis of how this curricular reform emerged onto the Brazilian education agenda using the agenda-setting approach of Kingdon (1995). The second is a comparison of coalition resources among those that supported and opposed the BNCC, rooted in the typology of resources introduced in the 2007 Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier & Weible, 2007). As very few papers have applied the ACF typology of coalition resources to the field of education policy, this analysis will provide a unique lens through which to understand the implementation of Brazil’s first national curricular education standards.

Author

• Danilo da Silva, Teachers College, Columbia University