Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: JOSÉ ANTÔNIO NUNES DE SOUZA

THE BOLSA FAMÍLIA PROGRAM AS A GEOGRAPHIC EVENT IN THE TERRITORY OF RIO GRANDE DO NORTE

Use of territory, geographic event, Bolsa Família Program.

Income transfer programs represent an important milestone within the scope of Brazilian social assistance policy. These programs emerged within a broad debate about combating poverty and extreme poverty, in particular, throughout the 1990s. Although some more specific experiences were observed in the 1970s, it is from the Constitutional Charter of 1988 that the role of the State in promoting a universal social protection policy is established. Consequently, the set of economic transformations of the early 1990s and their repercussions on the social sphere, led to a growing demand for social policies to mitigate poverty and extreme poverty, as a result of the strong recession of the 1980s, characterized, above all, by high rates of unemployment and inflation, which, even with the implementation of successive economic stabilization plans until that moment, showed no signs of reversing. The result of this process was a high number of people living in conditions of poverty and extreme poverty. The first experiences of implementing and operationalizing income transfer programs of a broader nature began in 1995. In general, these programs had as central characteristics the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty, raising the standard of living of families in vulnerable conditions, at the same time as it was articulated with other policies of a more structural nature, such as education and health. The Bolsa Família Program was established based on Law 10,836, of January 9, 2004 and regulated by Decree 5,209/2004, the result of the unification of the programs: Bolsa Escola, National Food Access Program (PNAA), Bolsa Alimentação and Auxílio Gas. In this sense, it emerged as a proposal to unify the income transfer programs in operation, with the objective of administrative changes, correcting errors in the conduct of previous programs and expanding coverage and targeting through the Single Registry. Thus, the objective of the research is to analyze the Bolsa Família Program as a geographic event in the territory of Rio Grande do Norte in the period from 2004 to 2022, with attention to territorial situations where there is a campus of the State University of Rio Grande do Norte (UERN) . The theoretical dimension of the research is structured in the category of the territory used (Santos and Silveira, 2008; Santos, 1994), reflecting on public policies within the scope of norms and state power in the territory. In turn, the geographic event category (Santos, 1996) allows us to analyze the Bolsa Família Program as an event structured from other events, with the capacity to intervene and transform a reality. We also use the category of geographic situation (Silveira, 1999), in which the materiality and organization of events are different in each place, admitting that social agents in the territory interact and propose new arrangements. The research methodological strategy consists of a quantitative and qualitative approach to the treatment of selected variables and indicators, and, through the analysis categories, the use of cartographic tools, to analyze the scope and limits of the Bolsa Família Program in terms of a social protection factor in Rio Grande do Norte, particularly in municipalities that have a UERN campus.