ONGs, políticos e partidos: padrões de interação NGOs, politicians and political parties: patterns of interaction Felix G. Lopez (felixglopez@gmail.com) Luciana de Souza Leão (lululeao@terra.com.br) Mario L. Grangeia (mario.grangeia@gmail.com) Introduction In the last three decades the ways in which state, market and society interact have experienced significant changes, resulting from the combination of changes in the economic order, in political systems and in cultural values in different parts of the world, among them Latin America. In Brazil, civil society has become more active, more involved in demanding better services and civic rights, in defending interests and in monitoring state and market actions (Reis, 2005, 2004; Avritzer, 2002, 2007; Fung, 2003). Particularly, from the 1990s onwards, there has been an exponential proliferation of civil organizations working in the country – currently, it is estimated that they number more than 14 thousand. 1 NGOs, 2 which are a type of civil organization, besides their role defending civil rights and holding the state accountable, they are now also important actors in the formulation, distribution and execution of public services and social policies. Consequently, NGOs are important partners for state institutions, which has allowed for activities which were formerly the exclusive responsibility of the state to be delegated to these organizations. As a result, an increasing amount of public resources have been transferred to NGOs to perform these activities. The close relationship between NGOs and the state represents an important change in the political and normative positioning of NGOs, which until the 1990s, generally established themselves in opposition to the state and purposely maintained distance from public agencies (Kumar, 1991; Landim, 1993, 2002; Medeiros, 2008). As a consequence of 1 This estimate is based on FASFIL (stands for “Private foundations and non-profit associations in Brazil”), a research conducted by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), Ipea (Institute of Applied Economics), ABONG (Brazilian Association of NGOs) and GIFE (Group of Institutes, Foundations and Enterprises) in 2005. This research estimates the existence of 330 thousand non-profit organizations in Brazil, but when we narrow the range just for the organizations whose sphere of action are “development and defense of minority rights”, “environment protection”, “rural development” and “other forms of development and defense of rights”, the amount is reduced to 14 thousand organizations, which employed 45.500 people in 2005. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, in the same year, there were 757 organizations of this type that employed 4.400 people. 2 To define a non-government organization is not a simple task. In the literature there are multiple ways of conceptualizing an organization of this type. In Brazil, the legislation does not even recognize judicially an NGO. In this fashion, any definition must be understood as a conceptual choice that incorporates dimensions of the NGO’s actions and disregard others. As Tvedt (1998) has shown, it is possible to present definitions of NGOs that highlight their formal-juridical nature, their economic dimension, functional role and their structural and operational organization. The definition chosen always has political implications. Our study has followed the common characteristics usually attributed to these organizations: non-profit, autonomous in relation to government, formal structure, non-representative or non-paritary (Koslinski and Reis, 2008). 1