The political culture in a tug of war

A study of the relationships between City Halls and Councils municipal public co-management in Ceará

Abstract

This article seeks to systematize some reflections on shared management processes of public policies in Ceará, based on the experience of the Municipal Councils for Sustainable Development. These reflections are based on research carried out in recent years and, more especially between October 1998 and June 1999, when we visited 10 Ceará municipalities, observing meetings of these Councils and interviewing leaders more or less involved in the process. Understanding public management sharing forums as democratic mechanisms, we ask ourselves about their conditions of possibility in a political culture, like the Brazilian one, deeply marked by clientelism. We seek to work on this issue from the tug-of-war game metaphor.