| Summary: | This thesis explores the ways in which a municipal government in Brazil developed itself
as a learning system through the support of a capacity-building project funded by the Canadian
International Development Agency. The project, which began in 1998, focuses on building
capacity for adaptive, community based watershed management in the municipality of Santo
Andre. It involves a team of Canadian partners led by the University of British Columbia Centre
for Human Settlements. Santo Andre is a city of 600,000 people in the Sao Paulo metropolitan
area.
The focus of the thesis is on Santo Andre's planners' perspectives about the individual
learning, and related organizational changes, that were induced by the project. In-depth
interviews were conducted with twenty-one staff holding a variety of planning responsibilities.
The findings are that, while not planned for in the design of the project, learning occurred at three
levels: learning by the planners as individuals engaging in daily practices, learning through
changes in the planners' relationships with one another and with residents of Santo Andre's
Watershed Protection Area, and learning through and about the organisational processes of the
municipal government itself. It is concluded that international capacity-building projects can
contribute to the enhancement of local planning to the extent they are structured to address the
potential for learning at all three of these levels.
|
|---|
