In October last year, we published a column, one of the pillars of lobby monitoring, which to date has not been regulated in Brazil. Today we write to confirm that this, in fact, happened. As regular collectors of public authorities, we believe that it is also important to record when something progresses. First, to encourage the civil servants who lead this type of initiative, which faces so many political barriers. Second, to combat social apathy fueled by exclusively negative news. When the population believes that nothing works or evolves, they stop getting involved, demanding and participating.
Knowing who the government interacts with is essential to understand where management priorities go, who can influence decisions and who is left out. Therefore, the Conflicts of Interest Law, currently applicable only to the federal Executive, requires authorities to disclose agendas of public commitments. For years this was done in a scattered and inconsistent way. It was typical transparency for the English to see.
After years of pressure from journalists, researchers and civil society organizations, the scenario began to change with the launch of , an official system that has already made it possible, for example, to discover and reveal .
But the big jump happened in August this year. Based on the experience accumulated since implementing the tool and proposals from the Council for Public Transparency, Integrity and Combating Corruption, the system was updated to version 2.0.
We have been monitoring the quality of public agendas since 2020, using our own platform, . Based on our data, we built a set of indicators that demonstrate significant progress by the government.
If previously only 6% of commitments contained the participants’ CPF, now 91% contain this information. In a country with millions of namesakes, this is what makes it possible to accurately identify who circulates in the corridors of power and cross-reference this information with other bases. This is what separates real transparency from decorative transparency.
Another crucial point concerns the meeting agenda. Last year, only 11% of commitments included the topic discussed. Now, more than half inform the agenda, allowing us to understand the content of the interactions and not just who was present.
The point that remains stagnant is the delay in publication. A quarter of the commitments continue to be published after the legal limit of eight days, a period that, let’s face it, is already insufficient for effective social participation. The ideal would be to publish before meetings, but less than 15% reach the system at least one day in advance.
An improvement that may go unnoticed, but deserves note, is the creation of system manuals for citizens and employees. Anyone who deals with government data knows the impact of the lack of data dictionaries, methodological explanations and training for those responsible on the other side of the counter. It seems like a detail, but it is exactly this type of infrastructure that allows effective social participation.
The evident improvement in indicators demonstrates the importance of cooperation between civil society and government to improve public policies. Previously a formality almost always ignored, the agenda transparency policy coordinated by the CGU has become a real instrument of social control. There is still a lot to improve, and we will continue to formalize new proposals, but we need to publicly recognize and congratulate advances when they happen.
Now, we need to demand the same level of transparency from the Legislature and the Judiciary.
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