This article analyzes the particularities of the decentralization of the state's action which took place in the Federative Republic of Brazil in the 1990s. It presents the circumstances surrounding the political-institutional government environment which constructed the scenario in the implementation of decentralized management in the healthcare sector. It identifies challenges in rebuilding federative relations arising from the field of macroeconomic management, the social policies management and the attempts to rearrange the public sector and public administration in institutional and management terms. The aim is to reflect on the situation of federal, state and municipal governments when implementing decentralizing processes. The conclusion is that decentralization in the country was operated in the midst of the strengthening of the nation as well as of convergence and tension between two distinct projects to reform the state: a liberalizing transnational economic project of state modernization, and a national project, socially built, to expand and universalize rights and to redemocratize the state. The federative innovations, in addition pressures and influences of those two projects, determined the intergovernmental relations in reorganizing the management of public policies.
Public policies; Government management; Federalism; Decentralization; State reform