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The changes that went down the drain

Economist shows that the governance system learned little from the water crisis that hit SP between 2013 and 2015

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Ecological economist Bruno Peregrina Puga set out to understand how actors and institutions within the water governance system dealt with the crisis resulting from an extreme climate event (drought) faced by the State of São Paulo from 2013 to 2015, considering that occurrences arising from Extreme climate change is important to reveal institutional failures in facing these new challenges.

In a thesis developed in the area of ​​environmental economics at Unicamp's Institute of Economics (IE) and guided by professor Ademar Ribeiro Romeiro, he adopts an institutional approach focused on three main aspects of water governance: the distribution of power, adaptive capacity and the capacity for institutional change as a result of political learning.

The approach considers that water resources management involves great coordination of several different actors and institutional levels; that the problems that affect the provision and quality of water resources are diffuse and involve different interests and views on the best way to allocate limited financial resources; that although environmental policy has ceased to be mainly centered on the States and has extended to various institutional scales and social actors, decentralizing management at the level of river basins, paradoxically, the analyzed crisis has brought to the fore the problems of lack of transparency in official bodies and the centralization of decisions in the State government which, even after it, were not resolved.

Photo: Scarpa
Ecological economist Bruno Peregrina Puga, author of the study: “We have a pendulum governance that works with some stability when there are no major conflicts, but which has proven to be extremely fragile in times of crisis”

For the researcher, “coping with the crisis at different institutional levels demonstrated serious water governance problems in terms of adaptability, transparency and effectiveness of actions. Water security in São Paulo, especially in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (RMSP), is far from being achieved and perhaps we have missed the opportunity to advance in the institutionality necessary to deal with the uncertainties arising from climate change”.


A lost moment

The water crisis constituted a fertile moment for the formation of networks of contacts between researchers, social movements, politicians and environmentalists who were dispersed despite having a common theme. Many reflections, diverse analyzes and recommendations emerged from this, but in the end the same common feeling remained: the impermeability of the political process as an impediment to the internationalization of these actors outside the state bureaucracy. It was clear that there was continuity in the adoption of an essentially technical model centered on the search for new sources of water for the RMSP, such as expanding interconnections between supply systems and construction of new dams, without considering the importance of sanitation works and demand management , still tiny compared to the international experiences studied by the researcher.

Examples from other countries have shown the impossibility of continuing to adopt this technical model, mainly due to the increasing inclusion of territories adjacent to the basin, and that solutions that seek water efficiency are much more successful and cost-effective. bigger. But such solutions were less prioritized without evaluating the real costs of major engineering works in ecological and social terms. In short, the thesis seeks to show that there were no fundamental changes in the management of water resources in São Paulo, despite the wishes of civil society, due to the asymmetry of power and centralism of decisions in the State.

Puga shows that the new legislation on water resources, enacted in 1997, has not yet been able to resolve problems of coordination and incentives at various scales, starting with municipalities, responsible for land use, and which should be led to more effective action on water contamination by sewage, agricultural and livestock activities and the recovery and preservation of forests, essential for the maintenance of river basins. The researcher also points out the lack of autonomy of the basin committees to act in the municipalities they cover. Finally, it highlights the small cooperation between neighboring basin systems that maintain a fundamental connection for the transpositions that guarantee water for the most populous regions, which ends up generating municipal and even state conflicts, widely publicized in the press on the occasion of the last major crisis. .

In short, says the author, “we have a pendulum governance that works with some stability when there are no major conflicts, but which has proven to be extremely fragile in times of crisis, with a tendency to centralize power in the hands of the state bureaucracy”.


Diversity of interests and views

For the author of the research, the water crisis that RMSP faced between 2013 and 2015 can be seen from several perspectives. Meteorologists investigate it as an extremely rare and unpredictable weather event. Economists generally analyze it in terms of changes in efficiency, regulation, investment in capital and infrastructure and from the perspective of privatization or renationalization of water companies, depending on ideological bias. Social scientists observe it preferably through the political process and power relations. Researchers linked to natural sciences and ecology highlight the deterioration of biophysical and ecological characteristics of water supply systems. Urbanists consider unrestrained land occupation movements and uncontrolled processes of urbanization and territorial concentration.

Others, the researcher exemplifies, highlight the decentralization processes and changes in the water resources management model, such as the privatization of companies in the sanitation sector, as factors that explain water insecurity and the neglect of issues related to sanitation. There are those who support the thesis that supply crises caused by extreme events result from the very way in which water resources are governed, in which ideology, water management, natural production and environmental regulation are mixed. Therefore, as defining the scope of the analysis constitutes a challenge given the complexity of the issue, the researcher clarifies his option: “By adopting a holistic approach based on methodological pluralism, I sought to analyze the complexity of water resources governance in a different way from that adopted in traditional economic theory.”

The general question, which the thesis sought to answer, is whether current Brazilian governance is capable of guaranteeing water security in the face of extreme events, based on the hypothesis that only polycentric governance, in which there are multiple decision-making centers in the same territory and institutional level, can lead to the adaptive capacity of the system and the guarantee of water security.

Likewise, says Bruno, “one must seek to understand whether the decentralization processes and current institutional arrangements are really effective in managing water resources at a time when climate uncertainties are envisaged”. He considers that the analysis at a time post-crisis of urban supply in some of the basins selected for study, particularly those of Alto Tietê and the Piraciaba/Capivari/Jundiaí system, made it possible to reveal conflicts and bottlenecks that were hidden or unknown to their managers .

For the researcher, it was clear that the water crisis faced by São Paulo resulted from a set of governance failures in which the management decentralization processes were not able to expand the system's adaptive capacity and contributed systematically to a production process of scarcity.

Puga believes that, when analyzing how different forms of power are configured, decentralization and water governance emerge, which should be considered not just an isolated event, but as an urban supply problem resulting from the conflict between different uses of water, which The trigger was a period of lack of rain, but this reveals a permanent situation.

“I sought to identify, from an institutional and political point of view, whether there were significant changes after the crisis in the way water resources were managed and which actors blocked or facilitated them. The way these actors organized themselves and what types of strategies, resources and narratives they used help to understand how the agenda to tackle the problem was created”, concluded Puga.

 

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Audio description: Panoramic image of a dam, where the water appears in the foreground and then an area with dry land and low vegetation, which was previously occupied by the dam. In the center of the image, a white seagull flies with open wings, facing away from the image. Image 1 of 1.

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