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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the shifting temporal and spatial frameworks of contemporary Brazilian economic policies through a description of the difficulties antitrust regulators faced when dealing with other branches of government, which limited the usefulness of their knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a 18-month ethnographic fieldwork at the Brazilian federal antitrust agency, this paper describes the difficulties antitrust regulators faced when a different branch of the federal government decided to implement an industrial policy which made their work less relevant or even useless. Taking as a theoretical background the literature of anthropology of bureaucracy, economic anthropology and the anthropology of time and future, the paper focuses on the impact the 'national champions' industrial policy - implemented by the National Development Bank during the Worker's Party administrations (2002-2016) - had for the federal antitrust agency and its professionals, taking into account the different temporal and spatial frameworks these two different policies (antitrust policy and industrial policy) implied.

Industrial policy makers, preoccupied with the long-term future strength of the 'national economy' were less inclined to pay attention to antitrust's particular focus on the short-term consequences of building large corporate conglomerates. Antitrust knowledge practices, aimed particularly to identify and prevent possible (and probable) future corporate practices, were considered as less relevant to economic policy as a whole. As antitrust policy's prospective engagement with future market scenarios seemed to be shifting to a retrospective engagement with past illegal corporate conducts, this paper also traces the different temporalities that were being transformed from the point of view of bureaucratic practices and lives. It analyses how some administrative proceedings and artifacts became less urgent, and how personal career projects were being compromised in this process, as regulators became uncertain about the future of antitrust itself.