Inflexões da conjuntura ultraneoliberal e pandêmica sobre a política de assistência social e seus benefícios eventuais

Abstract

This thesis presents the results of the research carried out at Postgraduate Program in Social Work - PPGSS/UEPB, which deals with the inflection of the pandemic period on the dynamics of regulation and granting of Eventual Benefits in the municipalities that make up the immediate geographic region Cuité-Nova Floresta-PB, considering the period from 2018 to 2022. Its main objective is to analyze the regulation and granting of Eventual Benefits in the municipalities that encompass the Cuité-Nova Floresta Immediate Geographic Region during the pandemic period (2018 to 2022). Occasional Benefits are recognized in the Organic Law of Social Assistance - LOAS and constitute one of the guarantees of the Unified Social Assistance System - SUAS. They aim to respond to demands related by birth, death, situations of temporary vulnerability and public calamity. Situations, therefore, occasional and transitory. To hold successive approaches to the object, we turn on the critical-dialectical method, as it led us to understand it from the perspective of totality, contradiction, mediation and historicity. As methodological procedures, we used bibliographic and documentary studies. Considering that the health crisis experienced across the globe, which worsened the economic, social and political crisis experienced by Brazil in the period, a reflection of a federal management with an ultra-neoliberal orientation, we indicate some trends related to the regulation, granting and financing of Eventual Benefits in the region: the presence of items in municipal legislation that regulate Occasional Benefits, such as orthoses, prosthetics and school supplies, not specifying whether these are financed by the Municipal Social Assistance Fund, the existence of laws that regulate Occasional Benefits that date back more than 15 years, which may indicate an outdated status, if we consider the regulations that guide the regulation of Eventual Benefits already published; the second trend observed consists of the impact that the pandemic context had on the budgetary forecast for both the Social Assistance policy and the Contingent Benefits, in which we see a significant increase, both in the planned resource and in the executed resource with Contingent Benefits during pandemic; furthermore, that the resource executed with Eventual Benefits exceeded what was expected, demonstrating that the context of heightened expressions of the “Social Issue” experienced during the pandemic had a major impact on the management and granting of Eventual Benefits; the third trend refers to the increase, both in individualized care and in the quantity of Eventual Benefits granted in Social Assistance Reference Centers (CRAS), in the municipalities that make up the immediate geographic region Cuité-Nova Floresta-PB, confirming what happened at a national level, there was an increase in demand for the security offered in the Social Assistance Policy, in particular, occasional benefits.