Description
The governance of complex humanitarian crises, such as large-scale migratory flows, is a challenge for multilevel political systems, demanding effective coordination. This project investigates the Brazilian response to the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis, Operação Acolhida, and the implementation challenges of its interiorization policy. The operation's highly centralized and verticalized institutional arrangement operates in a national context that lacks a coordinated National Migration Policy, transferring the integration burden to subnational levels, including states, municipalities, and non-state actors. The problem is that this centralized decision-making, combined with decentralized execution, creates a systemic overload on local governments, compromising reception effectiveness and revealing a failure in the intergovernmental coordination mechanisms of Brazilian federalism (Arretche, 2012). The central hypothesis is that, in the vacuum of state coordination, civil society networks emerge as "informal synchronizers" to de facto manage the reception process. To investigate this dynamic, the project employs a qualitative and comparative case study in Paraíba's main receiving municipalities, combining document analysis and interviews. Guided by the concept of Synchronization (Goetz et al., 2025), the analysis maps how the absence of formal organizational arrangements leads to the emergence of informal governance, analyzing the clash in the temporal scenario (timescape) between federal urgency and local capacity.
