It's difficult to follow the public debate in Brazil without stumbling, almost daily, upon warnings about the imminent fiscal crisis, the growth of spending, and the trajectory of public debt. It's clear that the country's fiscal situation matters, and ignoring these numbers would be irresponsible; even so, I confess to a persistent unease regarding this debate. I have the feeling that it ignores people: spending cuts are discussed as a technical imperative, often necessary to reduce waste, inefficiencies, and unacceptable practices like corruption, but rarely is there discussion with the same emphasis about where these cuts will impact and how they will affect the provision of essential public services and people's lives. Fiscal adjustments appear as abstractions, ignoring that their effects on health, education, and other basic policies manifest themselves very concretely on the population, particularly the most vulnerable. The unsustainability of the pension system is discussed, but almost never old age and the fate of millions of people who will grow old outside the models that organize these accounts.
This discomfort leads to some simple and unsettling questions: are we, as a society, truly preparing for the future, or merely reacting, with outdated categories, to problems that have already changed in nature? When the future arrives – and it will – will we be able to care for our children, support mothers, care for the elderly, provide basic security, and guarantee citizenship to those who live outside of fixed and regular employment?
It is clear that facing the challenges associated with ongoing transformations and the demands of the future necessarily involves economic growth, increased productivity, a reduction in informality, crime, and tax injustice, as well as an institutional environment that encourages investment, innovation, and income generation. Without this, the State's capacity is structurally limited. But the point here is different: even when – and if – growth comes, these problems will not automatically resolve themselves. They concern how the State organizes itself, decides, coordinates, and upholds rights in a society that is changing faster than its institutions.
The conversation I propose is to look at the State beyond the sustainability of its accounts, as a historical construct aimed at upholding rights, coordinating expectations, and offering some predictability throughout its life cycle. This shift reveals a deeper and more worrying mismatch than the fiscal one: between a society that already functions in digital mode and a State still operating in analog mode.
The State facing uncertainty in transformation.
The modern state was constituted to make social uncertainty manageable and to ensure rights, organizing collective life through rules, institutions, and public policies. This dual function – central to the construction of social protection systems and the guarantee of rights throughout the 20th century – is now being strained by profound and simultaneous transformations that alter the environment in which the state operates. Changes in the labor market, demographic profile, technology, climate, and politics itself accumulate, compressing institutional response time and widening the gap between available instruments and the problems to be faced, in a context aggravated by the weakening of multilateral institutions and the erosion of shared rules, increasingly replaced by the politics of the strongest.
In this context, the central challenge ceases to be dealing with isolated shocks and becomes managing their combined effects. Coordination, planning, and social protection mechanisms designed for more predictable contexts reveal increasing limitations. It is in this silent shift – less visible than a fiscal crisis, but deeper – that a crisis of historical adequacy is consolidated, of which financing problems are only the most visible aspect.
When the exception ceases to be an exception.
For a long time, crises were treated as disruptions to normality, to which the State responded by mobilizing exceptional instruments in order to then resume the regular functioning of its institutions. What seems to be underway today is a regime change: shocks have ceased to be isolated episodes and have become part of the very environment in which the State operates. Pandemics, extreme weather events, recurring economic instabilities, and humanitarian crises not only repeat themselves but frequently overlap, producing continuous pressure on public action.
Added to this scenario is a decisive transformation in the social perception of time. Immediate answers, quick decisions, and visible solutions are expected within increasingly shorter timeframes, even when problems become more complex, interdependent, and difficult to solve. Delay, even when necessary, is now interpreted as failure or omission.
This shortening of social time creates direct tension with the functioning of public institutions and democracy itself. Procedures, controls, coordination between levels of government, negotiation between divergent interests, and respect for legal frameworks all require time. These mechanisms, which function as safeguards against arbitrariness and serious errors, are perceived as obstacles in an environment that values speed above almost everything else.
The result is a growing mismatch between social expectations and institutional capacity. State action tends to be judged less by its consistency over time and more by its ability to react quickly. Complex decisions are evaluated even before they produce effects, the space for structural planning narrows, and exceptions cease to be temporary deviations, becoming persistent shapes of daily state action.
The State at its limit
Thinking about the future of the State requires shifting the focus from how much it spends to how it organizes itself, makes decisions, and sustains rights over time. This shift reveals, in the daily practice of public action, a growing mismatch between multiplying demands, expanding expectations, and the effective capacity to prioritize. The State is called upon to act on more fronts, under greater intensity and constant scrutiny, with institutional instruments designed for less turbulent, fragmented, and polarized contexts.
A central aspect of this dynamic – often overlooked in public debate – is that the demands placed on the State are not bound by fiscal, administrative, or institutional capacity limits. They present themselves as immediate needs, legitimate rights, or injustices to be remedied, and from the perspective of those experiencing them, they often are exactly that. The problem is that these demands inevitably accumulate, in volume and complexity far exceeding the State's capacity to absorb them and transform them into consistent public action.
This pressure is exerted both vertically and horizontally, crossing levels of government and distinct areas of operation, often without clarity regarding competencies, responsibilities, or coordination capacity. Everything seems urgent, everything seems essential, everything demands an immediate response.
This logic has direct effects on politics. When everything is presented as an absolute priority, choosing comes to be seen as denying rights; prioritizing, as arbitrariness; planning, as unjustifiable delay. The space for strategic decisions narrows, and politics begins to operate under the permanent management of conflicts, more focused on managing pressures than on sustaining choices over time.
The result is a state that operates increasingly close to its limits – not only fiscally, but also organizationally, politically, and institutionally. Emergencies cease to be temporary deviations and begin to occupy the center of state action. The logic of improvisation and rapid response tends to become normalized, replacing planning and structural action.
This is not simply a matter of technical incompetence. In many cases, this way of operating is a rational response to an environment that punishes prudence, delegitimizes delay, and rewards visible action. Under these conditions, the State functions less as a strategic organizer of collective life and more as a permanent buffer against successive shocks.
Opening the conversation
This first text did not intend to offer ready-made answers or solutions. Its objective was different: to reorganize the way we formulate the problem of the State, examining its current functioning to illuminate the risks projected on the horizon. The transformations discussed here are not merely immediate challenges, but signs of structural tensions that, if maintained, tend to deepen in the coming decades.
The central question, therefore, is not only how the State functions today, but what kind of State will be able to sustain, in the future, basic functions of protection, care, coordination, and guarantee of citizenship in a society that is no longer organized as it once was. A society that is aging with increasingly irregular work trajectories, smaller and more dispersed families, weakened traditional care networks, and demands for protection that span the entire life cycle. None of this can be solved simply with fiscal adjustments, nor can it be treated as a one-off emergency.
Opening this conversation means acknowledging that the central challenge is not only to better manage the state we have, but to ask whether it is preparing itself – institutionally, politically, and socially – for the world to come. In the following texts, this reflection will be deepened based on some of these critical points: the state that begins to operate under almost permanent emergency; the crisis of social protection throughout the life cycle; the limits of power, authority, and capacity that permeate state action; and, finally, the need to rethink the future of the state beyond the simplistic dilemmas that dominate the current debate.
To be continued …
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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