A política ambiental e os municípios brasileiros

Abstract

The thesis investigates the environmental policies of Brazilian municipalities. The starting point is the involvement in environmental action by municipalities mandated by the environmental legislation of 1981 and confirmed by the Brazilian 1988 Constitution. Contrary to the case in education and health, the environmental responsibilities vested on municipalities do not have financial and institutional strengthening mechanisms attached. We focus our study on the environmental mandate of municipalities and the resources available to them to carry out the corresponding environmental agenda. The question leading the research is whether municipalities can face up to their environmental mandate in the absence of regular financial transfers from other levels of government. Using a step-wise approach, the thesis pins down the contents and characteristics of the municipal environmental agenda, the resources required to implement it, and the extent to which those resources are available to municipal authorities. The first part of the thesis demarcates the field of environmental action according to the Brazilian legal and institutional framework. The profile of our main actor, the Brazilian municipality, is then presented. This is done through the mapping of the structural characteristics of municipalities and of their governmental responsibilities under the federal system of the country. The area of work of municipalities in environmental protection and management is identified next by crossing the overall municipal mandate for government action with the national environmental matrix. This allows establishing the contents of the municipal environmental agenda. Resources were examined first from a theoretical perspective and then through empirical study. The latter included both qualitative analyses using case studies and interviews, and the statistical scrutiny of data sets. The question of whether resource availability is a binding constraint to municipal environmental action can be answered as follows: municipalities do much more than expected in the environmental area, much less than they could possibly do under present conditions, and much less than is required from their constitutional mandate. The thesis concludes that, in spite of the institutional and financial restrictions binding their capabilities and limiting their resource mobilization possibilities, municipalities have shown an impressive environmental performance. Nonetheless, resource mobilization for this purpose was under potential. There is hence a wide area of municipal environmental action that remains to be colonized . Considering, however, the breadth of their overall environmental mandate, it is not possible for municipalities to fully respond to their constitutional environmental agenda without a supporting national strategy involving the federal and state governments.