Equity in discourse and advocacy of brazilian private social investment

• In Event: Activism and Social Justice in Social Work

Abstract

The Brazilian State is porous to the actions of different actors who have a political influence on the formulation of agendas and decision-making, including social investors: institutes and foundations of business, family or independent origin – discursively called “private social investment” (ISP) in Brazil –, which concentrate privileged economic and political power in relation to other Brazilian civil society organizations.
Timid until the middle of the last decade, the advocacy practices of Brazilian social investors became more recurrent from 2016 onwards (Gife, 2017), as one of the forms used in interaction with public authorities, including in education agendas – area which historically concentrates the majority of social investments (Gife, 2022). However, despite all educational indicators demonstrating which groups are vulnerable/lagging behind (Brazil, 2023), only 38% of social investors advocate for sectoral public policies or those aimed at specific population segments (Gife, 2020, p. 121).
Thus, as the Brazilian educational field is a space of discursive and ideological disputes, in which power relations manifest themselves in discursive choices (Fairclough, 2001), this research sought to respond, through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), to the following question: how does the understanding of equity reflect on the advocacy that ISP carries out in public education policies?
The theoretical-methodological framework mobilized in this thesis adopts as analytical categories (Miles; Huberman; Saldaña, 2014) the four types of public policies proposed by Lowi (1964, 1972), in convergence with the recognition policies and/or identity policies, debated by Charles Taylor (1995) and Axel Honneth (2003), and representation, problematized by Nancy Fraser (2007). Based on the different notions of equity present in classical (Rawls, 1971, 2003; Roemer, 2002, 2012; Sen, 1979, 2001) and contemporary literature (Fraser, 2010; Honneth, 2003; Pereira, 2010; Taylor, 1995), we sought to identify discourses that adhere to them, especially from the three-dimensional perspective elaborated by Nancy Fraser (2013, 2018), in which political discourse and symbolic representation are fundamental to ensuring that all groups have a voice in the public arena and are represented fairly.
The corpora analyzed brought together interviews with 26 professionals in the field of education and private social investment, as well as public documents, videos and institutional texts.
As a result, this case study describes how the understanding of equity gradually enters the initiatives and discourse of social investors and, mainly, how it is used as a discursive strategy and in political advocacy actions in the last two decades of Brazilian educational policies, with the approval of expensive agendas headed by the ISP. Considering the dialectical relationship that the ISP assumes in relation to the state, it was possible to identify that its speech is polyphonic and carries silences and erasures (Ducrot, 1987; Orlandi, 2007).

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Author

• Andrea Martini Pineda, EAESP, Fundação Getulio Vargas