CONTEXTS AND TRAJECTORIES FOR THE ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC POLICIES: THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION

The article presents an analysis model of contexts to understand the trajectory of implementation of public policies, providing theoretical and methodological contributions to the education field. It starts with the need to overcome traditional perspectives that reduce policies to oversimplified systems, such as the classic cycle. It considers the political dimensions of implementation, presenting the concept of trajectory and proposing five related contexts: (1) contexts of the conjunctures; (2) contexts of policy contents; (3) institutional contexts; (4) contexts of experiences; and (5) territory contexts. The contexts allow to understand the trajectories through a transversal, fluid, and dynamic chain of decision-making processes, which triggers and mobilizes different actors, processes, knowledge, and practices, crossing them. Our results suggest a model that considers the tensions, contradictions, challenges, and inflections linked to the life of policies, so that the analyzes are more dense and contextualized.