Desenvolvimento nacional e gestão de recursos hídricos no Brasil

• Main Author: Antônio Ioris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra 2009-06-01
• Series: Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais
• Subjects: management of water resources; political ecology; national development; neoliberalism; Brazil
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rccs/329

The management of water resources is related not only to the allocation, use and conservation of water, but also to broader issues of national development and political representation. The Brazilian experience, from colonial times to the recent phase of economic liberalisation, vividly demonstrates that historico-geographic complexity. During the period of concerted development, based on import substitution, large hydraulic infrastructure works were built in order to support urban and agro-industrial expansion. The high environmental cost and the insufficiencies of those initiatives started to demand more stringent mitigation and regulatory measures. However, the new legal framework introduced in 1997, despite some discursive and symbolic changes, mostly reproduced the same elitist and technocratic rationality of the past. Effective alternatives to water management problems require more democratic and equitable processes, which are inevitably associated with deeper social changes.