Institutions and bureaucracy in brazilian scientific and technological policy

We present an analysis of the institutional and political trajectory of Brazilian initiatives in science, technology and innovation, starting from the creation of CNPq, with emphasis on the internal dynamics of the Statedescribing the context and the institutionalization dynamics of the sector packed by the developmental diagnoses and the renewed prestige of “science” typical of those years. The purpose of the analysis is to verify known results from the literature on state, institutions and actors in Brazil and to base empirical research on the executive power in this policy field. The interpretation of the data was oriented in order to reconstruct the trajectory of the sector focusing on the internal dynamics of the decision arena and its political constraints. The results confirm theoretical generalizations of the Executive Power literature in Brazil, such as the centrality of personal contact networks in the implementation of policies in the 1960s and 1970s.