Exploring Brazilian Public Policies for Platform Cooperativism
President Lula with the Plan of Action for the Platform of Cooperativism in Brazil
As the world’s seventh largest economy, Brazil plays a fundamental role in the digital economy, with domestic platforms that have become regional leaders and a prominent position in the development of emerging technologies in the Global South. However, the country also has some of the worst working conditions for platform labor in the world, with precarious wage, algorithmic transparency issues and insufficient space for workers’ voices.
The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency has raised expectations of a change in this scenario. The president has promised to promote the creation of platform worker cooperatives in partnership with municipalities – drawing on consolidated Brazilian experiences such as those in Araraquara and his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, has criticized the current hegemonic model of platform work and proposed global pacts for the dignity of work in the 21st century.
A key element of this transformation is the development of public policies for platform cooperativism that integrate federal, state and municipal public institutions and empower workers and their associations. In this sense, as recently as 2022, hundreds of organizations, researchers and activists presented President Lula with an Action Plan for Platform Cooperativism – a vision, based on international experience, of what should and could be done in Brazil.
Two years later, what has the current Lula government, and the Brazilian state in general, actually done in terms of public policies for platform cooperativism? What is the effectiveness of the policies already developed, and how do civil society and workers evaluate their level of openness, coordination and development of past and ongoing initiatives?
Brazil’s National Congress. Photo: Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado
My ICDE fellowship project will seek to explore these research questions by analyzing the role of national, state, and municipal governments in promoting the development of cooperative platforms that deliver public services and contribute to the common good over the next two years.
Beyond the fact that I am a Brazilian researcher, what are the reasons for studying Brazil? Brazil has a solid history of cooperativism, with 17 million cooperative members in the country, and an emerging movement of platform cooperativism that comes from both its traditional cooperative structures and new initiatives led by tech workers and less institutionalized social movements, in addition to more than 20 years of policies promoting the solidarity economy. In this sense, Brazil represents a potential laboratory for successful public policies to support platform cooperativism and broader digital solidarity economy initiatives, offering a relevant research case that can serve as a comparative basis with case studies from the Global North or other regions of the majority world.
What public policies are we talking about in this context? The state can play a fundamental role in the development of platform cooperativism, from removing legal barriers that prevent cooperatives from raising capital and operating in diverse digital markets, to recognizing new models of intangible, remote work organized at scales beyond traditional state territories and jurisdictions. In addition, public policies can play a critical role in overcoming investment constraints by promoting cooperative incubators and providing credit lines, preferential public procurement, and differentiated tax regimes that favor the initial development of cooperatives without compromising their democratic governance and autonomy. Moreover, in a country where research and development is heavily concentrated in public universities and promoted by public agencies, the state can also support technology transfer and provide access to public databases for cooperatives to adopt or develop their own public and open technology infrastructure, away from dependence on proprietary solutions.
In this sense, a fundamental aspect of my analysis is not only to map what public policies are actually being implemented in Brazil-identifying relevant case studies at the municipal, state, or federal level-but also to examine how these policies are being designed, taking into account the role of civil society, academia, and dialogue with international experiences.
Brazil is home to an emerging ecosystem of actors around platform cooperativism and the broader digital solidarity economy: for example, Senoritas Courier, App Justo, Contrate Quem Luta, the MTST Technology Hub, Digilabour, the Cooperativism Observatory, Cootravipa, among others. What is the level of participation of these actors in the design of sectoral policies, and how do they evaluate these policies – from conception to implementation – in terms of barriers and opportunities? Moreover, given that Brazilian platform cooperativism is more institutionalized in some sectors than in others, what factors determine which actors have more or less access to shaping public policies in this area? What are the areas of consensus and controversy among this diffuse ecosystem of actors regarding current public policies in Brazil?
I will explore these questions through interviews with various stakeholders, including not only civil society, but also public policy makers from the executive and legislative branches, as well as senior executives from public technology companies and universities. A key point is to analyze the bridges and gaps that currently exist between different levels of government and social movements, which can be reflected in more integrated or fragmented policy frameworks.
This dialogue, or lack of it, can be a crucial factor in understanding whether public policies take into account not only the experiences of successful initiatives, but also those that have failed, learning from these results in order to strengthen the cooperative ecosystem without limiting its autonomy or making it permanently dependent on public funding, which would make it vulnerable to changes in government or political patronage.
In this regard, it is also essential to analyze how platform cooperativism appears transversally and intersectionally in broader public policies on the digital solidarity economy, digital sovereignty, artificial intelligence, technological innovation, citizen-generated data, urban management, education, among others. Are these initiatives fragmented-dependent on the articulations and political will of specific municipalities and agencies-or are they more broadly integrated into national policies and plans? This is a fundamental dimension to understand whether or not there is a consolidation of government policies as state, long-term policies, including an assessment of their resilience in the face of potential future government changes and their replicability across different territories and local contexts.
While this research is ambitious, some case studies and targeted analyses can help to go beyond the initial general mapping of the field and, as an ongoing research, narrow its focus. To this end, the research being developed this year, beyond the broad national mapping of policies, is already monitoring the evolution of public policies in the city of Rio de Janeiro on platform cooperativism – from specific funding projects to their transversal presence in the municipal plan for innovation and artificial intelligence. Rio de Janeiro is a Brazilian city of global resonance; it even hosted the 2022 Conference of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, along with many international conferences. It is also home to many of the country’s leading universities, and has a municipal IT and public data company, as well as successful public platforms used by cooperatives, such as taxiRio – a platform that has completed 11 million rides with 16,000 drivers and 670,000 users, making it one of the most promising municipalities to study in Brazil.
However, this example brings to light a relevant dimension of Brazilian specificity that demonstrates the need for further research in the Global South: while studies on public policies have focused primarily on the role of municipalities, it is necessary to recognize the inequality among municipalities in their capacity for investment and technological support, especially in a country with significant regional disparities like Brazil. In this sense, a historical element in the country is the role of the national state in promoting both cooperatives, as seen in family agriculture, and free technologies, such as free software, through public procurement, allowing these solutions to scale and be adopted by other federal entities – highlighting the importance of looking beyond the role of municipalities, which has predominated in international discussions.
At the same time, it is crucial to carefully analyze whether the state does not reproduce top-down construction logics, as seen in the past with the preference for national champions, even if they are based on precarious work. Therefore, it is also necessary to acknowledge the tensions in which public policies for digital markets emerge, analyzing how the platform cooperativism movement confronts the lobbying of Big Techs and digital monopolies that seek to shape the regulatory environment in their favor. On the other hand, it is also interesting to see how the paradigms of the movements influence or are appropriated by the state administration, such as the proposal to incorporate Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) based on blockchain into public administration, which was one of the first topics that appeared in the initial exploratory research.
For all these reasons, I believe that my research can make a fundamental contribution not only to Brazilian movements and workers, but also to the comparative discussion of case studies on an international scale, in dialogue with – and perhaps paving the way for – future collaborative research with other scholars and activists from Latin America and around the world.
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