TECHNICAL-ADMINISTRATIVE CAPACITY AND GOVERNMENT PLANNING: an analysis within the State Secretariat of Planning, Budget, and Management of Rio Grande do Norte (SEPLAN/RN)
state capacities; government planning; Rio Grande do Norte; technical-administrative.
The implementation of government planning instruments depends on the work of sectoral planning agencies, which must have an effective and professionalized technical staff to coordinate processes, manage resources, and produce information that guides government action. To carry out these responsibilities, these organizations require a range of state capacities that support government activities. Based on this premise, this study aims to understand the influence of the technical-administrative capacities of the Rio Grande do Norte State Secretariat of Planning, Budget, and Management (SEPLAN/RN) on the government planning process. The study will use secondary data drawn from regulatory, institutional, and administrative documents from the SEPLAN/RN and the State Basic Information Survey (ESTADIC/IBGE), supplemented by semi-structured interviews with managers and civil servants from sectoral units directly involved in the planning process. The analysis is based on an adaptation of the model by Pires and Gomide (2016), whose analytical categories are operationalized using contributions from authors who discuss specific aspects of the concept of technical-administrative capacities, such as professional bureaucracy (Evans; Rauch, 1999; Subirats, 2006; Souza, 2015; Marenco, 2017) and organizational resources (Papi; Santos; Seidi, 2024; Wu; Ramesh; Howlett, 2015; Souza; Fontanelli, 2020), technological (Wu; Ramesh; Howlett, 2015; Ribeiro; Macaya; Coelho, 2021), and financial (Pires; Gomide, 2014; Cortez; Lotta, 2022), triangulating the evidence through documentary research descriptive statistics on RStudio, and content analysis based on Bardin (2016) with the support of the IRaMuTeQ software. The findings are expected to contribute to the expansion of studies on state capacities from the technical-administrative perspective at the state level, an area that remains largely unexplored in the national literature thereby broadening the understanding of how state planning secretariats utilize resources and institutional arrangements to carry out government planning.