Abstract
This article analyzes how the National Financial Education Strategy was established in Brazil. This case study on the agenda-setting and policy formulation in the field of public policies is based on John Kingdon’s multiple streams model. It aims to contribute to the understanding of government decision-making processes by identifying theoretical elements in an empirical situation. Since the early 2000s, financial inclusion is considered by international organizations and governments as a way of fighting poverty. This culminated in the G20’s Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion, launched in 2010. However, the perception that the population’s financial education is important for social inclusion was disseminated years earlier by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Since 2003, this organization has actively developed content and recommendations for the adoption of financial education strategies by countries. In Brazil, the topic gained space in the government agenda in 2007 and was a permanent public policy by December 2010. Based on bibliographical and documentary research methods, this study demonstrates that the influence exerted by the OECD was not sufficient to raise immediate government attention to the topic and points to a more complex set of factors and actors that allow the coupling of the three streams, resulting in the escalation of the topic to the decision agenda.
Keywords:
Financial education; Agenda; Streams