THE PUBLIC ACTION OF INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL BODIES IN SINAES REFORMULATIONS: REVEALING COALITIONS
Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Superior (SINAES). Pentágono das Políticas Públicas (PPP). Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF).
The public policy of evaluation of undergraduate higher education that emerged in the context of the Regulatory State is inserted in a neo-corporatist environment in which state instances function as an environment of mediation of divergent interests of multiple actors. In the internationalization environment of discussions about education and its evaluation, with the active participation of international intergovernmental organizations and the emergence of transnational for-profit private entities, Brazilian national actors tend to interact with these international actors by forming coalitions, based on the sharing of beliefs and representations, designed to act in an articulated manner towards the implementation of their respective interests. This is markedly due to the legal permission granted by Brazil for the performance of private for-profit organizations in the Brazilian higher education scenario in the late 1990s. From the combination of discourses and actions between international organizations and national entities at a non-trivial degree of articulation, the coalitions formed on the one hand, defenders of education as a right (public good) and, on the other hand, defenders of education as a commodity (private good). The public action of the actors articulated in coalitions, among their various meanings, from their beliefs and representations, as well as through the use of technical knowledge as a political resource, contributed to the shaping of a significant institutional reform of the National Evaluation System. Higher Education (SINAES) in 2017, in a process of interaction between them that, despite the resistance, operates the synthesis of antagonisms in results that accommodate the prevalence of care of one of the coalitions: that of the defenders of education as a commodity (private good). In the light of the theoretical categories perceived in the empirical field, we formulate and use our own model conceived from the combination of elements of the Public Policy Pentagon (PPP) and the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to analyze the data, obtained from official documentation and interviews with representatives of the various actors identified in the public policy subsystem for the evaluation of Brazilian undergraduate higher education.