This volume, the Brazilian case in the series The International Library of Policy Analysis, constitutes a first effort to understand how the activity of policy analysis has developed in Brazil and how it stands at present. The purpose of the series is to publish studies that throw light on how policy analysis has evolved and how it is structured in different countries. When we accepted the invitation from the general editors – Professors Michael Howlett and Iris Geva-May – to coordinate the Brazilian study, we realised the challenge, but also the opportunity, of what is an innovative project in the Brazilian context, where policy analysis has never been the object of study from the perspective proposed here. The activity of policy analysis, as defined by the international project – a type of knowledge produced by different actors in public and private organisations and designed to inform public policy decision-making – has never been named, mapped and much less systematised in Brazil.

Nonetheless, it was also evident that a great variety of studies, evaluations, diagnoses, reports and research is produced in Brazil not just about public policies, but also for public policymaking. Unlike well-established academic production in the fields of the human sciences – in economics, history, sociology, political science and administration – the difficulty of the undertaking resided exactly in the lack of an academic tradition of thinking about policy analysis for the policy process. In that respect, to survey the state of the art in how policy analysis is taught and operated in Brazil would entail naming this kind of activity and endeavouring to trace its contours as an object, which was done as the research progressed. This meant that the editors, who are also chapter authors, discovered and defined the specific features of this phenomenon only to the extent that the research and discussion with the other authors advanced.

There are substantive differences to policy analysis in Brazil as compared with (particularly) its counterpart in the US, regarded as the country that pioneered policy analysis as an activity with certain specific characteristics. In the first place, there is a lack of conceptual differentiation as regards the very term ‘policy analysis’: there is no definition of policy analysis, as established in the North American literature, designating a specific modality of analysis oriented to public policy problem-solving.