Municipality as a federal entity and municipalization in Brazil

Resumo

This article discusses the consolidation of municipality as a federal entity in the Brazilian scenario, which has happened since the 1980s. The Constitution of 1988 has materialized expressive innovations to municipality sphere, in such a way that the municipality has become one of the federal entities, and it has been regarded as a politically independent unit, enacted in the power capacity of elaborating its own Organic Law. For this reason, it has been prevented from the tutelage of the states. Since then, municipalities have been regarded as a single federal component. Our main goal with this bibliographic research is to debate the municipality as a federal entity, as well as the creation of municipalities in Brazil in the period from 1965 to 2020. We aim at introducing this topic to the international community as an example of what has occurred in Brazil regarding municipalization and the above-mentioned Constitution, in order to contribute to further international comparative studies about this topic in other countries. For this reason, we briefly discuss about municipal services that were created after the Constitution of 1988. The results demonstrate that the greater number of municipality emancipations may happen not only due to the Constituent, but, at the same time, due to an increase of population and the necessity of administrations in the local scale. Municipalizations have been happening at a slow pace, but the local administrations have taken responsibility over services that were in control of the Union and states. However, we must consider that the capacity of local governments to implement policies and collect resources is distinguished, this way occurring an unequal municipal development. As a consequence, there may be slow advances in municipal governments.