Government policies and intervention profiles: reflections on the analysis of state intervention

Abstract

Within the framework of a multidisciplinary studies perspective, the article envisages to develop a theoretical methodological referential for analysis of State policies in the social field, indicating it as an appropriate tool for the understanding of differences in content, range and limits of each stage of governmental intervention in social questions in Brazil.

Using the approach of the notion of an intervention profile, the study has in view:

• the contradictions and numerous determinants of governmental action in the social field, which turns into an impossibility a mechanical and direct relationship between the enhancement of State intervention in this sector and the improvement of people's living conditions;

• the necessity to sort out, among the numerous determinants of governmental actions, those economic, political and social phenomena of a more structural and historical nature, distinguished from the ones essentially circumstantial, in order to design future settings for developing political policies.

Moreover, the article also tries to analyse health policy in Brazil, in the 70's and 80's, pointing out the scope and limits of changes under way, as well as their perspectives.