Comitê de bacia hidrográfica do rio Paraíba: arranjo jurídico-institucional, sociotécnico e ambiental.

Abstract

The change from a centralized and water management into a decentralized management of water resources in the Brazilian legal agenda came with the democratic paradigm ascribed in the world water documents, in the 1988 Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil and in the Law n. 9.433/97, called Water Law. The organism that best approaches the decentralized management proposal is the River Basin Committee (RBC), because it includes members of the Government, the Civil Society and Water Users. The State of Paraíba is submitted to the commands of this innovative water legislation and, although its water policy dates back from 1996, the new arrangements introduced necessarily reach the legal standard of the State. However, only in 2006 the River Basin Committee of Paraíba (RCB-RIO PB) was created to manage the water issues of this basin in a decentralized way. Few studies have been conducted directly or indirectly in this college. However, the systematic analysis the committee‟s performance since its formation until today had not been presented, a fact that raised the research question: what are the relations produced by RCB-RIO PB between 2006 and 2011? To solve the existing problems, the research proposes a systematic, interdisciplinary approach to the RCB-RIO PB under the legal-institutional, socio-technical and environmental dimensions, the goal of which is to conduct a comparative analysis with other Brazilian state committees whose stages of activity are consolidated and advanced. The theoretical rationale of the work permeates the international documents that influenced the Brazilian legal system, by Acts n. 9.433/97 and n. 6.308/96, which determine the general rules for formatting RBCs in Brazil and in the State of Paraiba. The research method consisted of comparative-deductive reasoning that stemmed from the general premises contained in the Water Law regarding the committee to review RCB-RIO PB by comparing it with other committees. Therefore, the comparison was made through the bylaws of these committees and the committee of Paraíba River, whose normative documents were collected from the official websites of the State Governments and their related entities. Nevertheless, the Acts and Resolutions of the RCB-RIO PB were analyzed, because its content consists of important data sources concerning the committee. The results obtained indicate that the bylaws of RCB-RIO PB suffers from weaknesses that greatly hinder the execution of the powers vested in the committee, reflecting negatively on the legal-institutional, sociotechnical and environmental sustainability in the basin. Thus, it is suggested the reform on the RCB-RIO PB bylaws through a comparison with the internal rules of the committees used in the research.