FROM DISCRETION TO REFLECTION: Continuous Contract Oversight by Street-Level Bureaucrats and a Proposed Casebook at IFRN Currais Novos Campus
Contract oversight; Street-level bureaucracy; Discretion; Collaborative action research; Public governance.
The oversight of outsourced service contracts with exclusive labor dedication is a strategicactivity for public governance, especially after Law No. 14.133/2021 and Normative InstructionSEGES/ME nº 05/2017, which expanded the duties of contract inspectors and managers. Evenso, little is understood about how these agents exercise discretion when implementing suchrules. This research aimed to understand how contract inspectors and managers at IFRNCampus Currais Novos exercise this discretion in the oversight of continuous services and tocollaboratively produce a casebook of cases and dilemmas to support critical reflection on thesepractices. It was grounded in the street-level bureaucracy perspective (Lipsky, 2010; Lotta,2010), which recognizes discretion as inherent to implementation work under scarce resourcesand ambiguous goals. A short-cycle collaborative action research was adopted, qualitative andapplied, through a single case study, with five participants (three inspectors and two managers)from a census universe of six designated agents. Data collection combined documentaryanalysis of six contracts, semi-structured interviews, and a feedback seminar, and the analysisarticulated content analysis, a gap analysis across the prescribed, instrumentalized, andpracticed planes, and collective communicative validation. The results revealed a robustnormative framework and disclosed three modes of oversight under the same rules: silence,contained competence, and rupture. The coexistence of these modes showed that the gapbetween the prescribed and the practiced stems not from noncompliance or the absence of rules,but from the conditions under which the instruments are used, notably the lack of training. Asa technical product, the Casebook of Cases and Dilemmas, collectively built and validated,translates the dispersed normative repertoire and opens to deliberation what the rules do notexhaust. It is concluded that improving oversight does not require multiplying rules, butrecognizing discretion as inherent and providing agents with the means to exercise it withgreater awareness, consistency, and security.