Agenda building and institucional innovations: a comparative analysis of sanitary reform and urban reform

Abstract

This article focuses on two basic issues related to the process of public policies reform and the relations between them: the constitution of new public agendas and the translation of these agendas into institutional changes. We incorporate contributions from different theoretical fi elds in order to build a model of analysis that is applied to two empiric cases of constitution of reformist agendas, which have had repercussions in the public policies, leading to institutional changes from the 1988 Federal Constitution on: the sanitary reform and the urban reform. We aim at identifying the decisive factors of both processes by emphasizing the role of ideas in the agenda building processes and in the institutional innovation and by understanding the symbolic and interpretative dimension of the political process. Analytically, we focus on recognizing the ways in which certain understandings of social problems that are developed by collective actors are related to the process of policy formation (also involving specific sociopolitical dynamics) in which ideational innovation interacts with institutional constraints.