Gestão ambiental participativa: trajetória das conferências estaduais de meio ambiente do Amazonas

Abstract

Since the 90´s, the participation of various social sectors has become an important strategy of governments in the formulation and implementation of public policies. The Brazilian government, only in 2003, established the National Conference on Environment and its state-level stages as a tool for a wider social participation. For this board to be constituted as a legitimate arena of public deliberation, a prerequisite is that they are able to attract the involvement of various sectors of society. Although formulated strategies and standards are adopted nationally, the effective social participation will be subjected to local contexts. Thus, it becomes relevant to assess in practice how the general processes of mobilization triggered by national conferences of the environment produced their reflections in the context of the state of Amazonas, in particular. In addition, one must question whether this process of public consultation has been extended to influence the formulation and implementation of public policies in effect. The evolution of the composition and social representativeness of plenary and delegation of the state conference of environment (CEMA) and the degree of implementation of its resolutions were analyzed based on the investigation of all previous editions in the Amazon. Data were collected through a survey of government documents, interviews with representatives of the organizing committee and delegates and a participatory assessment made with public managers of key government agencies. While the trajectory of environmental conferences in the Amazon points to a social balance in gender representation, the representation of generations still seems far from ideal. The geopolitics of plenary representation and delegations is marked by the predominance of representatives from the state capital and the low participation of the private sector / employer is committing the social representativeness of the conference. The State Conference on the Environment, by not having hitherto been legally formalized as a deliberative body SISNAMA, its decisions do not become binding, which leaves to the discretion of the government to consider them as a guiding instrument of environmental policy. Taking as reference the level of implementation of 156 resolutions of II CEMA, it was found that among sixteen key government agencies, the secretaries of Environment and of Production accounted for most of the actions and programs that resulted in the implementation of 77% the resolutions adopted. Although lately the state has created several specialized thematic councils, such mechanism should not replace the State Conference, therefore, much more than those, conferences are public spaces that can mobilize society more broadly.