Advocacy: organizar e irritar – estudo de caso da Organização Conectas

Abstract

Among the different types of processes used to generate changes in society, this master thesis is dedicated to the study of the advocacy process and to answer the following research problem: for wich reach does the Conectas organize the environmental noise on human rights? How is this process made? Understanding that there is still no academic production in Brazil that proposes to analyze in depth what advocacy is, the first chapter of the dissertation seeks to clarify what it consists of, how it happens and what makes it different from other social participation movements, such as social movements, non-governmental organizations and lobbying, and it also brings some of the historical background that may have given rise to this process. We also briefly present the two theoretical fields most used to study advocacy: the Transnational Advocacy Networks – developed by Keck and Sikkink – and the Advocacy Coalition Framework – developed by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith. The second chapter analyzes the theory that guides this work, the Social Systems Theory developed by Niklas Luhmann. The required concepts to understand the dissertation are presented – such as systems, environment, autopoiesis, meaning, communication, themes, code, operational closure – and a topic is dedicated to the concept of irritation. The last chapter is dedicated to the case study, in which we analyze the advocacy actions carried out by the non-governmental organization Conectas Direitos Humanos, connecting its actions to the theoretical aspects presented of the Systems Theory. In this chapter, we study the Conectas organization, its history, mode of operation, finances and activities carried out between 2007 and 2019 and, finally, we contrast the actions carried out by Conectas with the characteristics presented in systems theory, in order to verify whether our hypothesis that the Conectas organizes environmental noise on human rights through its advocacy actions with the aim of making them more audible, increasing the chances that the topics discussed would be accepted by the legal and political systems of Brazil, can be proved. The main goal of this work is to analyze how the advocacy actions of the Conectas organization arrange the environmental noise on human rights in order to make it appear as irritation for the political and legal systems in Brazil. We conclude by thinking that the effectiveness of advocacy actions can be related both to irritation for the systems theory and to the denotative sense of irritation. To obtain data, in addition to document analysis (Conectas’ annual reports), we conducted semi-structured interviews with people associated to the organization. The case study was based on Maíra Machado's model.