Paloma Carpena de Assis

A new Social Organization, Observatório Social de Maringá - OSM, founded in 2006, in the city of Maringá situated in the State of Paraná, in the Southern region of Brazil. The organization changed the institutional environment of the bidding processes. The OSM established a dialog channel between the Society and the City Government of Maringa. Through the tenet of The New Institutional Economics was possible to analyse the governance structure, monitoring the public tender and opening a cooperation channels between OSM and the public organizations, especially with the City hall of Maringá. This present work has the aim to analyse the economic results achieved by the organization Observatório Social de Maringá in bidding processes in the period of 2005 to 2010. For the accomplishment of this purpose, a qualitative and quantitative approach was done, by means of a bibliographical and field research. The field research was divided into four steps: acquaint with the OSM, follow up some contest, interviews and collection of data regarding the bidding processes. The result was that the structure of the governance can be divided between formal and informal. The formal structure presents a project formalized democratic ideal, although it was not implemented in the daily. In other words, there is an informal structure even though it has problems. The informal structure comply with the objectives proposed, monitoring public spending through the bidding processes and be a social instrument looking for transparency in the management of public resources. Talking about the participation of the OSM in the public tenders, this relationship between the organization and the City hall helped to reduce the number of tender processes, although the spending has doubled, and the OSM only works in two departments. This action provides more accuracy, but creates a mechanism that the manager can direct the public tenders where the OSM doesn’t work, causing difficult to the social control.