Mensurando a governança da água em bacias hidrográficas compartilhadas no Brasil: proposta metodológica e aplicação à bacia do rio Piranhas-Açu.

Abstract

The successive years of records of low rainfall (2012 to 2017) in the semiarid regions of Northeast Brazil triggered a prolonged drought, with the consequences of a water collapse that caused significant social, economic and environmental damage and compromised the operation of the complex Brazilian water resources management system. Although having a well-designed legislative framework, climatic, environmental, legal and institutional factors hinder the interaction between different social actors, tasked with promoting water governance in this geographic space. In this sense, this research aims to evaluate the model of shared governance of water resources in the Piranhas Açu River Basin - located in the States of Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte / Brazil. Thereunto, an innovative methodology is used, having as reference the principles for good governance elaborated by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators (1990) and the principles of water governance enunciated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2015. Ostrom's principles were analyzed by consulting documents (laws, decrees, resolutions, meetings minutes, deliberations, water allocation terms and regulation marks) and participatory observation at meetings of the River Basin Committee Piancó Piranhas Açu - CBH-PPA. For the OECD principles (2015) it was used document analysis (AD), participatory observation, and survey research, by consulting 20 (twenty) members of the CBH-PPA. For such, these members had to fill an evaluation framework, composed of the OECD principles (2015), in relation to four evaluation criteria, graded on a scale from 01 to 05. It is important to highlight that the presence of these principles, in certain systems, signals the existence of strong institutions. The research has an exploratory character, expressed by a case study, initiated with a document investigation of the acts performed by the agencies responsible for the governance and management of water resources in the delimited territory, in the period from 2003 to 2019. As a research technique, content analysis was used, a procedure that allows a systematic, objective and qualitative-quantitative description of the content under analysis. In this sense, the research describes in detail, all the historical evolution of the legislation concerning water resources in the studied area, highlighting the similarities and incongruities of the legal texts. It also analyzes the collective action efforts of the partakers in the construction of robust and efficient institutional arrangements. The results of the analyzes made it possible to identify that Ostrom's principles, due to their generality, are partially adequate to measure all aspects of water governance, limiting themselves to generically equating managerial congruencies and incongruities in the field of study. The OECD principles, on the other hand, demonstrated greater breadth and specificity, as the adoption of evaluation criteria for them, allowed to measure the level of governance in the field of study, generating gradual output concepts (from moderate to strong). Based on the attribution of degrees of consensus, the evaluations were considered to be at a median level, which ultimately allowed proposing necessary recommendations for their improvement.