O financiamento público direto a projetos culturais: uma avaliação do Fundo Nacional de Cultura

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the employment of the National Culture Fund towards financing cultural projects between the years of 2016 and 2019. Specifically, the main goals were to study cultural rights and cultural economics; to understand the cultural policies sector in Brazil, on the federal level; and to perform a diagnosis of the use of the NCF in this time period. It was found that culture has a transversal quality, serving as a catalyst for human development while also having great economic potential. In this context, cultural economics presents itself as a strategic field for the country’s development. The demand for cultural policies, as ensured by the Constitution – especially regarding cultural rights –, is current and ongoing in a country such as Brazil, which is experiencing a return to unfortunate traditions of instability, authoritarianism and neglect when it comes to cultural policies. The employment of the NCF, covered under the Rouanet Law as a fomentation mechanism, takes place within a context where tax incentives and the subsequent funding via private sponsorships are the main forces when it comes to cultural policy, which in turn submits the cultural projects to interests of the market. The NCF was created in order to stimulate the equitable regional distribution of resources aimed at the cultural field. However, as the analysis of the data collected during this research shows, between the years of 2016 and 2019, the number of cultural projects which benefited from this mechanism’s fundraising was small, especially in comparison to the Tax Incentive. Furthermore, the distribution between regions is disproportionate, and this Fund fails to fulfill its role of regional dispersion of investments towards cultural projects, regarding fomentation from the Rouanet Law. The method chosen was the hypothetico-deductive, with the use of literary review, document analysis, and interviews, thus outlining the qualitative approach and exploratory character of this research.