Estela Neves "Brazil 2004: Environmental Challenges and Local Action" October 25, 2004

Estela Neves spoke about the key role of municipalities in the environmental policy process on October 25.

Innovative Environmental Planning by Brazilian Municipalities
By Renata Marson Teixeira de Andrade-Downs

How have Brazilian municipalities dealt with increasing environmental problems, poverty and social-economical inequalities? The urban boom that has taken place during the last 15 years in Brazil has both increased environmental degradation and fomented innovative environmental protection programs at the municipal level. In her CLAS presentation, visiting scholar Maria Estela Neves, an architect and environmental planner from Brazil as well as a scholar at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, focused on this paradox, and the structures and politics of municipal environmental policy.

Urban growth and the mosaic of municipalities

The post-World War II urban boom created a mosaic of diverse municipalities with heterogeneous approaches to environmental problems. Before the war, just 40 percent of the Brazilian population was urban, and in 1940, there were only 1,587 municipalities, concentrated mainly in coastal areas. By 1997 there were a total of 3,920 new municipalities. Then in 2001, 53 more new municipalities were formed. The size of these municipalities and population density can vary greatly. For example, municipalities along the Southeast coast are much smaller, concentrated in denser urban clusters, while in the Amazon, some municipalities occupy areas similar in size to some European countries.

Most of these new cities were formed during the frontier expansion in the Amazonian Northwest. The majority, around 4000, of the Brazilian municipalities have less than 20,000 inhabitants. Only 35 municipalities have more than 500,000 inhabitants. With a population now at 180 million people, 82 percent of whom live in urban centers, including some 20 percent in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and with a land mass of 8.5 million km2 divided up into 26 states and 6,000 municipalities, Brazil confronts major challenges.

The municipalities are distributed in a wide range of environmental zones with differing climate, vegetation, topography, water availability, energy and distribution of natural resources. The main ecosystems zones are the semi-arid Caatinga in the Northeast, the Atlantic rainforest, Amazonia and Cerrado in the Brazilian midwest, which both often suffer from massive deforestation, the Pantanal wetland system in the southwest and the southern savannah of the Pampas. Municipalities in these different zones face dramatically different problems.

These municipalities present a wide range of “quality of life” index scores, with differing environmental risks associated with the level of poverty and other factors. Using the Municipal Human Quality of Life index, Neves showed that quality of life in Brazil ranges from levels associated with India to those on a par with Belgium.

Multiple local solutions have been offered. One well-known example is the city of Curitiba. Its world-renowned public transportation system became part of the city’s integrated urban plan which was formulated in the 1970s based on principles of environmental management. Today, Curitiba’s experience has been transplanted into other Brazilian cities with their own transportation issues.

Reductions in the federal government’s role in the 1990s, including decentralization, have led to institutional innovations regarding environmental policies and management at the local level. Two important environmental management institutions are the municipal community council and the Public Ministry.

Brazil’s 1988 constitution launched a wave of serious decentralization, leading to an uneven pattern of financial and budgetary resources among municipalities. Many municipalities have thus adopted more efficient and transparent participatory programs to solve their economic, social and environmental problems. One important aspect of institutional innovation has been the creation of local community councils that have absorbed grassroots movements and backed social programs and environmental policies at the local level. Neves asserted that in 2001, 1,237 municipalities had active local environmental councils. However, 21 percent of those environmental councils are concentrated in seven large cities in the south and southeast, which have received financial support from international agencies such as the World Bank and international NGOs.

There are several modalities of local environmental management agencies, including municipal executive bodies, local councils, consortia and cooperative compacts between municipalities and various stakeholders. In all these cases, municipalities have to develop local environmental legislation to enable them to create local protected areas and sustainable development practices. However, many municipalities have chosen to multiply their environmental agencies, arguing that one agency is not enough to implement policies. In Brazil, municipalities have “triple autonomy,” at the political, administrative and financial levels. Even if municipalities have no permanent sources of funding for their environmental programs, on average, municipal expenditures have been higher than federal but lower than state budgets.

The Public Ministry

While exploring the institutional context of environmental actors, Neves described the “principle of cooperation” among federal, state and municipal governments. “The national government promotes general guidelines, in terms of environmental policies, first transcribed by the states and then transformed into regional policies, second translated by the municipalities into local interest policies.” Following the1988 Brazilian Constitution, environmental governance assumed a federal model with responsibilities divided between the national, state and local government.

Thus municipalities have material duties to implement policies, and power to create their own municipal laws. In that sense, it is the Public Ministry who proposes legislation to defend the environment when there are conflicts over its uses and establish agreements to enforce federal or regional environmental laws when they are differ from municipal ones. Neves highlighted that the Public Ministry protects the rights of society — represented as consumers — to have access to resources and public services.” As the environment is seen as providing public services, the Public Ministry plays an important role in environmental conservation and conflicts, serving as an attorney between the public itself and between the public and the government,” she said.

Forest conservation and management at the local level

“Because they provide habitat for biodiversity and human environmental services, three important vegetation ecosystems are protected by national preservation laws: the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the Amazon Forest and the Cerrado,” said Neves. “After 500 years of deforestation along the Brazilian coast, only less than 10 percent of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest still remains.”

Neves explained that the remaining Atlantic forest has been under great pressure of habitat fragmentation caused by growing urbanization between the two large metropolitan cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The Amazon forest and the Cerrado are not so fragmented because they are not suffering the same pressure as the Atlantic Forest. However, agriculture and logging have increased the rate of deforestation in these two large biomes.

“Local actors have been active in combating illegal logging and deforestation in the Amazon region,” said Neves. The regional plan for the Brazilian Amazon passes from regional guidelines to local action. She described how the regional plan prescribes general guidelines such as the “creation of buffer zones and limiting open access to the forest, and the recognition of local community property rights in public lands.” On the other hand, municipal and local actions include the provision of rural land for traditional communities, creation of parks and land use zoning and other land use policies.

Environmental zoning and urban growth

Land use zoning in Brazil has been exclusively executed by municipalities. Neves explained that “smaller scale territories can only be controlled by municipalities as the municipalities create local laws and recommendations to determine land use policy enforcement.” According to Neves, “it would be very expensive to the state to manage community property rights for all traditional communities located in the state territory, so this responsibility is passed to the municipal level.” She argued that the state’s budget would be too expensive if local environmental zoning and urban zoning were not municipal responsibilities.

However the implementation of environmental zoning into land use zoning is a process of negotiation among local stakeholders and the private and public sectors; it depends on the network of many non-government and government actors. “Municipalities are still considered minor partners by the federal government when dealing with regional environmental policies,” said Neves. She also explained that municipalities will gain terrain in regional environmental planning as “the majority of regional environmental policies depend on local territorial planning and land use zoning for biodiversity and habitat conservation.”

Neves emphasized the importance of a network of “social partners” in local environmental planning. Because the federal and state governments can be fragmented, there is a need for municipalities to participate in environmental planning. Brazilian municipalities are bringing together a network of social actors including community councils, the private sector and the Public Ministry to implement environment policies at the local level.

Estela Neves is an environmental planner affiliated with the Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janerio.

Renata Marson Teixeira de Andrade-Downs is a graduate student in the Energy and Resources Group.

Ms. Neves talking with a student after the event.