Governance in Brazilian Food Sector: Case Studies

Several advantages are pointed by the literature indicating the articulation among companies of a same sector located in a same territory. In Brazil, however, the cooperation and the alliances creations for mutual exploration of business opportunities, especially among small companies, still happens with a lot of difficulty. This is due, mainly, to cultural factors as lack of mutual trust and the mistaken idea that the competition among them happens only in local level. Such factors represent very strong challenges to be overcome in order to understand the idea of full collaboration. In this way, it can be standed out the importance of actors roles in the local policy networks in promoting actions to make the companies notice the benefits of the collaboration and of the formation of alliances. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the policy networks in the food cluster of the city of Marília (State of São Paulo) and implications of the use of the resources of power (information, financial capacity, technological capacity and reputation), for incentive or inhibition of cooperation initiatives and collaboration among companies. Key-words: policy networks, food industry, cluster