Government planning in Brazilian municipalities: towards a research agenda

Abstract Brazil’s Constitution of 1988 gave municipalities the status of autonomous federated entities. They were assigned a series of responsibilities in the field of public policies, including the duty of preparing government plans. Before the constitution, planning and the state capability regarding this task were concentrated in the federal bureaucracy. In this institutional and organizational changing scenario, the objective of this article was to investigate the scientific production regarding municipal planning. A systematized search of articles was carried out on the Portal Periódicos Capes databases for the period 1995 to 2018. The results showed that the field is incipient, lacking theoretical and analytical regularity, privileges a normative bias, and is strongly based on approaches developed in the field of business administration. This study corroborates the relevance of this research agenda. It stresses the importance of local management for the federation and the protection of rights.