The FGV Applied Research Network [RPCAP (PPA) – Call 001/2021] funds the project.

Project Summary

The project aims to analyse the references to World Health Organization (WHO) legal instruments in the practice of the Brazilian Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers to assess the public authority and overall influence of the WHO on existing public health policies in Brazil. The project engages in an innovative multidisciplinary research methodology with the application of data science knowledge, combining both quantitative and qualitative research approaches. It intends to identify the methods and strategies for the incorporation of norms and standards issued by the World Health Organization into Brazilian law.

For data collection and identification of mentions, we conducted an automated search methodology via Python programming language and applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques and statistical methods for textual analysis. NLP includes different types of vectorizations (or embedding) and informational clustering techniques to determine the semantic proximity of the national documents and each WHO legal instrument.