Public Innovation in Post-Transition Countries: Experiences from Brazil and Romania

Abstract

We compare two cases of innovation in public services in Brazil and Romania, aiming to illustrate the connection between innovation, modernization, and path-dependence. One case is the Brazilian Pathway School Program, and the second is the Romanian School Bus Pro­gram. Both countries experienced periods of transition, which we considered fruitful for his­torical analysis. We based our investigation on two comparative case studies, using secondary data and employing document analysis and pre­vious researches’ reports. While Brazilian Path­way School Program proved to be a successful story of designing a centralized policy, Romania walked in the opposite direction, from a central­ized state, under the communist rule, to a polity where innovation occurs at the intersection be­tween local community and central government. In Romania, it would be difficult to perceive the contingencies of local engagement in a country where civil liberty was suspended for 42 years. In Brazil, the inquiry was connected to the atypical federation, where the subnational states devel­oped an extraordinary economic and budgetary dependence on the Union.