Signal

In 2022–2024, the Brazilian federal government moved R$ 10.35 billion in cultural fomento through three distinct programmes: Lei Rouanet (Law 8.313/91), Política Nacional Aldir Blanc (LC 195/2022, "PNAB"), and Lei Paulo Gustavo (LC 195/2022, "LPG"). The three totals are of the same order of magnitude — Rouanet captated R$ 3.49 bn, PNAB transferred R$ 3.00 bn, LPG transferred R$ 3.86 bn. But each programme's geography of money is a different geography.

Rouanet sent 40.9 % of everything it captated to a single state (São Paulo) and 82.4 % to the top five. PNAB and LPG each sent 18.9 % to the top receiving state and around 48 % to the top five. In the same country, in the same three-year window, two federal pipes distribute money about half as concentrated as the third. That 22-percentage-point gap doesn't come from programme intent or thematic priority — it comes from transfer architecture.

Rouanet operates through tax expenditure: the federal government forgoes IR revenue, and the private donor decides which project receives the money. The big tax-planning departments are in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. PNAB and LPG operate through direct federal transfer to each state or municipality, with allocation formulas that weight population and area. Brazil's population is spread across 26 states + the Federal District. The two architectures reach the territory in completely different ways.

Why this matters

There has been a long-running debate in Brazilian cultural policy about the regional concentration of fomento money. For decades, the only federal lever at scale was Rouanet — and for decades the critique was the same: the money stays in SP and RJ. The 2022 constitutional reforms (PNAB) and the 2022 emergency law (LPG) brought, for the first time in decades, a structural alternative to the indirect design. This Note stacks the three accounts side by side, normalises by population, and shows empirically that the architectural switch works as redistribution — not as rhetoric, but as a table.

Three immediate implications:

  1. For the public debate: Brazilian federal cultural money changed geography in 2022–2024, but public perception still runs on the inertia of three decades of Rouanet. The mental image "the money stays in SP" correctly describes one of the three programmes and ignores the other two.

  2. For the Ministry of Culture: the empirical evidence that the redesign works supports the case for continuing both programmes beyond their emergency phase. PNAB was designed as permanent policy (LC 195/2022 art. 1); LPG was emergency-only and was extended by subsequent legislation (Law 14.628/2023). There is a political window in 2026 to decide whether the design persists.

  3. For the book: this is the cleanest distributive finding in the atana-data corpus so far. Methodological pluralism applied to a single policy question — three independent administrative sources, the same temporal window, three answers that only converge when the architecture is named.

What the data say (1) — national concentration

Three programmes' territorial concentration, 2022–2024

Figure 1 shows each programme's share going to the top-1, top-2 and top-5 states.

Programme Architecture Top-1 state Top-2 states Top-5 states
Rouanet Indirect via tax expenditure (since 1991) 40.9 % 61.0 % 82.4 %
PNAB Direct transfer to entities, general-purpose (since 2022) 18.9 % 28.7 % 48.4 %
LPG Direct transfer to entities, AV-specific (2022–2024) 18.9 % 28.7 % 48.3 %

Two observations:

What the data say (2) — who receives how much per capita

Per capita by state, three programmes stacked

Figure 2 normalises by the 2022 IBGE Census population and shows federal cultural R$ per capita, summing the three programmes. Four readings:

The R$/hab ratio between the top receiver (RJ R$ 73.48) and the bottom (MS R$ 35.15) is 2.1×. The same ratio computed only on Rouanet would be tens of times larger (see Figure 3).

What the data say (3) — states swap places when the design changes

Bump chart: each state's rank under each of the three programmes

Figure 3 shows, side by side, each state's position in the R$ per-capita ranking of each programme. Every line is a state, connected three times — once per programme. The eye reads the finding without reading a table: the red lines (top-5 of Rouanet) plunge dramatically from left to right; the navy-blue lines (top-5 of PNAB) climb just as sharply in the opposite direction. The two architectures literally invert who is on top.

Four concrete readings:

For a quantitative reinforcement of the switch: the R$/hab ratio between the top and bottom state is 80.8 × if computed on Rouanet alone, 2.4 × on PNAB, 2.5 × on LPG, and 2.1 × on the sum of all three. The drop from 80× to 2× is the quantitative version of the same switch that Figure 3 shows as crossing lines. It's not hyperbole — it's the ratio between two real numbers.

Independent cross-validation. IBGE SIIC table 3.15 (federal Cultural tax expenditure, Receita Federal source, 2023) places 77.8 % of federal cultural tax expenditure in the Southeast — confirming, from an entirely separate administrative source, the concentration our SALIC measurement reports as 61 % in SP+RJ. Two independent sources (SALIC microdata + Receita Federal aggregates) describe the same geography of tax expenditure.

What the data say (4) — the beneficiary-level number (v3 extension, July 2026)

On 30 June and 1 July 2026, MinC/SNIIC presented three previously-unpublished studies at the I Seminar on the Evaluation of Results of the National Aldir Blanc Policy — the first official evaluation of Cycle 1. One number dominated the reading: 167,817 cultural agents reached by PNAB between 2023 and 2025. Of those, 145,235 came via municipal initiatives and 22,582 via state actions.

Two slices of the distribution of these agents matter directly for this Note's argument:

These two fractions are the direct quantitative backing for the territorial argument of the preceding sections. Where Figures 2 and 3 showed where the money goes by state, this section shows where the beneficiaries actually live by municipality size. PNAB does not merely transfer money across the federative map — it reaches people in municipalities that Rouanet has never systematically reached. Given Rouanet's historical pattern (40.9 % SP + 82.4 % top-5 states), the probability that 40 % of the beneficiaries of any given PRONAC live in cities of up to 20,000 inhabitants is vanishingly small. This is not a marginal shift — it is a categorical inversion.

Complementarily: the three execution lenses of PNAB Cycle 1 are 97.1 % (states), 94.4 % (municipalities), and 95.8 % (national) — near the ceiling for a funding programme in its inaugural cycle. A programme born in 2022 and designed to reach 5,596 federated entities achieved near-universal execution in three years.

Byte-level cross-source. The total resources mobilised as declared in the SNIIC studies — R$ 3 billion — matches exactly the "recebido" value already registered in atana.pnab.execucao_financeira (also R$ 3.00 bn). Byte-level validation across two independent administrative sources (the PNAB portal and the SNIIC study) on the same programme is the sort of correspondence a data-based piece can claim.

What PNAB has not yet published is the agent-level data. The 167,817 stands as an aggregate; the microdata (agent × municipality × state × value × gender × race × age bracket) will be released on an unannounced schedule. When it drops, a v4 refinement of this Note will publish the full distributions. Watchpoints active in _atana_intel/sources.yaml (SNIIC + PNAB Cycle 1 landing + CULTBR + Aferição).

An open paradox for later work: TCU (Judgment 1709/2025) rated PNAB governance maturity at 1.75 / 3, with Risk Management scored 1 (the lowest on the scale). The same programme delivered 95.8 % execution in three years. A policy instrument formally classified as "not institutionalized" on the risk dimension delivered near-perfect execution. Note #24 candidate — "The execution paradox: how the TCU's lowest score reached the highest federative recall."

Implications

The Note documents a clean distributive finding. Four immediate implications:

(i) For federal cultural budget design. The choice between indirect (Rouanet) and direct (PNAB/LPG) architecture is today the most relevant distributive lever in federal cultural policy. The Ministry has evidence that the redesign works — not just in intention, but in where the money lands.

(ii) For the debate over programme permanence. LPG was extended, PNAB was designed as permanent. There is a political window in 2026 to decide what continues. The Note provides empirical grounding for the defence: three years of operation by both programmes have redistributed federal cultural money to territories it had never reached before.

(iii) For the public narrative. The mental image "federal cultural money stays in SP and RJ" correctly describes one of the three programmes. For the other two, the opposite is true: the São Paulo resident receives below the national average, and the Amapá resident receives above the São Paulo resident. Public perception lags the data.

(iv) For the system of accounts. IBGE T3.1 (direct federal cultural spending, 2023) is R$ 856 mn/year — only 4.5 % of total public cultural spending. This is a structural underestimate of federal influence, because it excludes tax expenditure (Rouanet) and excludes PNAB/LPG transfers (which appear in T3.1 as state/municipal spending once received by the entity). The true scale of federal intervention in Brazilian cultural fomento is ≈ R$ 3.5 billion/year — four times what T3.1 reports directly — distributed across three programmes with three architectures. Any honest reading of the system needs to consider all three simultaneously.

(v) For the design of future versions of the programmes. Two specific observations that Figure 3 (the rank-swap chart) makes visible and that deserve legislator attention:

Caveats (W1–W5)

# Alert
W1 This Note runs against the atana.salic.projetos_v2 subset — 26,203 PRONACs, ≈46 % of the Rouanet 2019–2026 universe — for consistency with Análise 7 (SALIC sondagem) and prior publications. The coverage-state audit of 2026-07-05 (Phase 9a) established that the canonical table atana.salic.projetos is at 48,189 PRONACs (~85 % of universe) — the documentation was stale, not the corpus. Re-running the concentration analysis on the full canonical table yields virtually identical shares: SP 40.9 % → 40.8 %, top-5 82.4 % → 82.6 %. The distributive pattern is insensitive to coverage; the Note's finding remains robust — a re-measurement on the full corpus will be a footnote, not a substantive revision. See docs/methodology/salic_api.md §1.1 for the full reframe. IBGE T3.11 cross-validation (Rouanet 2022 captation nominal R$ 2.12 bn vs our deflated R$ 1.43 bn BRL-2024) remains consistent.
W2 PNAB and LPG are transfer programmes; money received by the entity then enters state/municipal execution, and part of it goes to projects via subsequent calls. This Note measures the transfer (money arriving in the territory), not the final project-level application.
W3 Short window (3 years). PNAB and LPG operate from 2022; Rouanet from 1991. Comparison is only possible in the co-existence window. LPG is by design emergency; its redistributive architecture may or may not persist beyond 2024.
W4 Census 2022 final populations. IBGE official 2022 release (ResIBGE, June 2023) is used as denominator. Marginal differences with post-2022 estimates do not affect the ranking.
W5 Does not include direct federal cultural budget (IBGE T3.1, R$ 856 mn/year in 2023). That budget is small relative to the three federal accounts analysed here, but it exists and has its own distribution. A complete analysis of "federal cultural money per capita" would need to sum all four sources.

Sources

Source atana schema Table / module Window
MinC SALIC API (Lei Rouanet) atana.salic projetos_v2 (26,203 PRONACs; canonical projetos at 48,189, see W1) 2022–2024
MinC PNAB execution atana.pnab execucao_financeira (5,425 entities) 2022–2024
MinC/SNIIC — I Seminar on PNAB Cycle 1 (v3 extension) atana.pnab ciclo1_avaliacao_headlines (12 metrics × 6 dimensions, Phase 10 Move A) 2023–2025
MinC LPG execution atana.lpg execucao_financeira (10,984 transfers) 2022–2024
IBGE Demographic Census (denominator, outside atana) official 27-state table 2022
IBGE SIIC Chapter 3 (cross-validation) (outside atana, direct xlsx read) T3.11 + T3.15 + T3.1 2013–2023

Cross-walk to UNESCO FCS 2025's 14 cultural domains in canonical.domain_crosswalk (atana.pnab → Multiple transversal; atana.lpg → Audiovisual cultural; atana.salic → multi-domain).

How to cite

Roque da Silva Junior, J. (2026). Three programmes, three geographies: Rouanet × PNAB × LPG, 2022–2024 (v3.0). Atana Note #21. atana.studio/notes/21/.

Version history

Version Date Change
1.0 Jun 2026 Initial publication. Concentration + per-capita + rank-swap analysis with 3 charts.
2.0 Jun 2026 Label-collision fixes (Fig. 3); refinement of the RJ-exception and MS/MT/GO/BA/RN gap findings. LinkedIn long-form (PT). EN sync.
3.0 Jul 2026 §"What the data say (4)" extension — beneficiary-level quantitative backing from PNAB Cycle 1 (167,817 agents, 58 % interior, 40 % ≤20k inhabitants, 95.8 % execution, byte-level cross-source with execucao_financeira). SALIC coverage calibration note (48,189 canonical vs 26,203 used here). Continuation queue with Notes #22, #23, #24. Charts unchanged; the new findings are text-and-table.

Planned extensions

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