SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT AND THE WATER RESOURCES SYSTEM
IN SÃO PAULO STATE

Stela Goldenstein
Deputy Secretary of the State Secretariat for Environment
of São Paulo

The traditional model of water resources management versus the sustainable development one

The social-economic development method traditionally adopted in Brazil has brought about serious environmental problems - water resources degeneration among them, which has alarmingly increased in São Paulo - which have endangered not only life quality of its inhabitants, but also the very development of the State.

Therefore, it has become urgent to find alternative methods of development. The critical issue, whose re-assessment has become mandatory, is a decision-making model on the use of water resources, its handling and maintenance.

The sustainable development method, starting with a more democratic and integrated decision-making process, allows institutional transformations and re-orientation of investments targeting on meeting the needs of current and future generations.

Sustainable Development and Planning

In this context, planning means identifying demands and making the best decisions to meet them through a procedure that is simultaneously technical, political and permanent process.

It is technical because it involves analysis, evaluation and synthesis, it transforms data into options of guidelines for plans; it is political because it involves social-economic and political-administrative systems, as much as the social segments of society, thus demanding constant negotiations; and it is permanent because it involves follow-up, evaluation and constant corrective procedures.

Outcomes from such planning are plans, i.e., proposals of targets to be met taking into account the aimed scenario, followed with feasibility strategies and with follow-up and updating procedures.

Planning Water Resources

Sustainable planning of water resources aimed at their recovery and maintenance has to adopt structural, non-structural, comprehensive and integrated solutions and has to take into account social, economic and political features, thus being the result from negotiations between the agents involved in order to reach a consensus.

This way of planning only started to be outlined in the ‘80s and it had to face a centralized State and disconnected agencies related to the water resources management. In 1988 the Federal Constitution caused a breach in this centralizing feature by making regional and municipal agencies responsible for norms and inspections.

But the process of changing attitudes of agents responsible for water management has been sluggish, and so has awareness and involvement of all the other segments of society. Therefore, there has to be a water resources policy that includes integrated managerial proposals, which takes into account municipal, regional (of the basin) and State issues.

During that same period of time, as the Country was becoming more democratic, civil society started to count on increasingly more organized structures, which made it more qualified to demand participation in the decision-making process.

Systemic Management

The concept of the system comes from the idea that at physical, animal and social levels it is possible to identify groups of interdependent elements, i.e., elements related to each other in such ways that, should one of those relationships be modified, so would the others and, consequently, all the group would be different.

The proposal of a systemic structure of public action foresees that the performance of each sector be carried out in a way articulated with the actions taken by the other sectors so that it would involve a shared decision-making process. For water resources, this kind of management was only possible thanks to the democratic process that has enlarged the decision-making levels by including non-governmental social sectors. Thus, management systems can now start healing the effects from centralization, mainly the lack of water-use planning. The Integrated System of Water Resources Management has foreseen the need of an institutional and political agency so that such planning would be possible.

The System in São Paulo

After in-depth studies were carried out and also after a long process of discussions and debates that assessed how urgent a change in the water resources conventional management was, in December 1991 the Law 7663/91 was issued. It established guidelines for a State Policy for Water Resources and created the Integrated System of Water Resources Management.

The System includes heavy program content features within its guidelines and principles such as: adoption of the river basin as planning and managerial reference; de-centralized, shared and integrated aspects and it is meant to respect water cycle; recognition of the water as a public asset, whose use has to be paid for in order to meet satisfactory standards for current users and for the future generations. To make the use of water compatible with regional development and environmental protection so that it can ensure priority to supplying inhabitants and also the participation of civil society in the decision-making group are also significant elements of which the State System is composed.

The System has established institutional and political bases for democratic and de-centralized planning for each river basin. Thus, it allows carrying out such policy and it also grants financial means and proper institutional organization for the use, maintenance and recovery of the water resources of the São Paulo State.

The system relies on three different bases and the success of programs and actions for the water resources management, sanitation and environment depends on their articulation: the decision making one, the technical and the financial ones.

The decision-making bases are the State Council of Water Resources, central collegiate and the Water Basins Committees, regional collegiate groups composed of, on the same level, representatives of State and Municipal agencies and of organized groups from civil society.

The State Council is a decision-making and consulting agency at strategic and central levels, with powers to perform functions related to formulating, implementing and meeting the State Policy.

The Water Basins Committees are democratic collegiate groups that make feasible the regional management of water resources. Its functioning is complex due to their involvement with many segments of this kind of de-centralized management. They do exist today, after 15 years of contradictions and disputes over the democratic process within the water resources sector. In São Paulo the Law 7663/91 initially created two committees for critical areas: the one for the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiai River Basins in 1993 and the one for the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo in 1994.

Today, the 20 committees foreseen in the 1994/1995 State Plan for Water Resources involving 22 River Basins have already been established and implementation process of all of them was brought forth with the discussion about actions and investment priorities required according to the basin plan foreseen in the law. Many sector meetings have been held with representatives from the three segments, general seminars in order to negotiate the composition and the elaboration of the by-laws, which gathered all interested people in a broad and democratic forum.

The technical base is the Coordinating Committee for the State Plan for Water Resources, which is also responsible for supplying State Council and, in a de-centralized way, Water Basin Committees; for formulating the proposal for the State Plan for Water Resources, which is elaborated every four years and which includes guidelines for the use, recovery and protection of water resources. Evaluation of Plans works as an instrument to assess if the Plans for River Basins are compatible with the Status Reports and for promoting integration of the agencies involved in the System.

The Committee for the State Plan is chaired by a collegiate group composed of State agencies and entities responsible for managing water resources as for quantity and quality. Other State agencies and entities take part in the process through technical teams, and Municipalities may participate in the de-centralized Committee for the State Plan, at Water Basin Committees discretion, which, however, has not been foreseen in the law.

The State Fund for Water Resources is an instrument of financial support of the State Policy, and its financial resources come from the budgets of State and Municipalities through financial compensation gotten from the Federal Government by the State from the use of hydroelectric resources; from national and international loans; and, in the future, from collection for the use of the water. The Fund’s structure includes sub-accounts so that each Basin Committee is able to manage its own resources; and projects and actions shall only be subject to approval if they have been foreseen in the Basin Plans and in the State Plan.

The 1990 State Plan has established a hierarchy for the priority of the use of water and it has indicated 12 Thematic Programs which included almost all aspects related to water resources, besides classifying the 22 River Basins into categories – industrial, industrial to-be, farming and cattle-raising, and of maintenance; they also defined recommended investments in each basin based on priorities and quality goals and the contents of Status Reports.

The law has also foreseen, as already mentioned, Water Pricing and a Water Basin Agency that, due to its very complexity, is still being implemented.

The proposal of the Basin Agency, is the result of a broad debate started in 1994 in the Committee for the Piracicaba, Capivari and Jundiai River Basin. It took two years of negotiations, technical meetings, workshops and political discussions, which provided guidelines for the Water Pricing Low. Among them one can mention: the Agency is not meant to be profitable; that it shall work separately from the State, financially and administratively free; that it shall be subordinated to a collegiate group appointed by the Water Basin Committee to inspect its functioning and its meeting the Committee’s deliberations, besides appointing the heads of the Agency; that the use of water is to be charged; that it may ask loans, including international ones.

If the Water Pricing Law passes, the Basin Agency will start a new phase in the management of water resources in the São Paulo State and there will be an increase in the de-centralizing process of water management. It will be a technical and managerial agency of financial resources, administrated and inspected by the State, Municipalities and Civil Society.

Implementation of Water Princing, as it will have an impact over the economy and public finance, is still a controversial issue, which has also demanded strong debates in all Committees and State Council involving the interested sectors. Technical meetings, public hearings, regional discussions and seminars have been held, besides the elaboration of studies and simulations targeting on informing, debating and getting subsidies to elaborate the Water Pricing Law. It is worth noticing that nowadays only the water offer, collection and sewerage services are charged, but not its use.

The draft of the Water Pricing Law was sent at the end of 1997 to the State Legislature of São Paulo. This proposal forecasts that the price of water be determined according to aspects such as the nature of the source, class of use of the water body, water availability, the goals to be met, location of users at the basin, among other aspects, which shall allow that collection effectively be a political instrument for managing the water resources of the State. Another fundamental aspect is the one that determines that the outcome of collection be invested in the every basin where it has been collected.

Water Pricing shall be, therefore, an important water resource managerial instrument, which will help the Committees to establish goals in order to meet environmental improvement indexes of the river basins.

Implementing the Integrated System of Water Resources Management in the São Paulo State has meant a significant change in the perspective of water management and today it can be taken as a powerful instrument of planning a sustainable development. There already is some de-centralized institutional room, regional integration of governmental and non-governmental agencies and entities that used to work isolated; there is civil society participation in the decision-making process and a search for solutions of local problems; increasing awareness through informing the public about the water resource issue and through neutralizing decisions made to benefit certain groups related to the public administration.

Water Resourses System has been, therefore, a reference for all other State and for the every Federal Government, which has elaborated the Law 9433/97, which has created the National System for Water Resources Management.

The National Law, in its fundamentals and principles, is compatible with the Law 7663/91, it supports the State Law of São Paulo because it praises the institutionalization of a policy and of an integrated managerial system, de-centralized and shared, thus changing the national scenario where agencies work as isolated sectors, with often conflicting or even opposite objectives, goals, understanding and regulations.

After being analyzed at the National Congress for six yeas, discussions about the National Law were based on the Law 7663 of São Paulo and that is why one can see some common topics as follows: rational use of the water as supply as its priority; multiple use; maintenance and protection against actions that might jeopardize its current and future use; de-centralized management for each basin shared among the Federal Government, State, Municipalities and Civil Society and integrated to the other natural resources.

Thus, one can say, with some certainty, that the future of a sustainable management of the water resources lays on constant improvement of these instruments, which have already proved to be efficient even during the short period they have been in force, because they have succeeded - with the participation of interested non-governmental sectors and so consolidating citizenship - in indicating proper solutions and strategies that have local problems as their starting points, taking into account the diversity of aspects and agents involved in water resources management.