Cities public management - exercise to identify possibilities for post-pandemic life

Abstract

The article describes the implementation of a set of remote activities, whose the authors organized with public managers’ teams from a medium-size city of São Paulo state between May and July 2020. The participants’ perceptions about the situation experienced in the country in that moment were identified and the main perspectives for local government’s response to the serious context placed by the COVID-19 pandemic were debated. The work can be considered a technical advisory for the elaboration of public policies and also was configured as a participatory research case. For its development, it was followed a script for local governmental initiatives’ formulation aimed at responding to the crisis. Possibilities of public policies to be implemented in the post-pandemic period were identified so that the city in question could be ruled by principles and guidelines for greater interaction among people, environmental sustainability, combating inequality, social inclusion, and for respecting norms and sanitary protocols. At the end, the participants outlined a set of proposals to local action, assessed as having the greatest impact on the population and with feasibility for implementation.