Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp

6º Encontro da ABCP
29/07 a 01/08/2007, Unicamp, Campinas, SP

Área Temática: Estado e Políticas Públicas

Práticas Deliberativas:
A construção de poder decisório nos comitês de bacia hidrográfica

Rebecca Abers
Instituto de Ciência Política,
Universidade de Brasília

Margaret Keck
Political Science Department
Johns Hopkins University

Rebecca Abers, Margaret Keck 1

The Political Construction of Decision-Making Power
in River Basin Committees1

Over the last twenty years, we have seen a worldwide trend towards inclusion
of participatory deliberative bodies in the process of public decision-making. Such
forums are created for a variety of purposes, including democratization of access to
decision-making, enhanced public sector accountability, pooling information and
resources, reducing transaction costs, and solving problems. Responding to
Constitutional mandates, demands from social movements, and the international
diffusion of the idea that governance mechanisms can supplement (or replace) state
capacity, tens of thousands of deliberative councils have been set up throughout
Brazil. A main focus of institutional reform in the water management sector, the focus
of this paper, has been the creation of new deliberative bodies at the River Basin
level, called River Basin Committees. These bodies bring together actors from local,
state and (when applicable) federal government, civil society, and large water users
ranging from sanitation companies, to industries, to farmers. Many proponents hoped
that these new arenas would transform decision-making in the water sector,
guaranteeing that multiple interests and viewpoints be considered in management
decisions and building commitment among the vast diversity of private and public
actors who have a stake in how water is managed.
Simply put, our research makes it very clear that the existence of a
participatory deliberative body does not ensure that it can actually deliberate, make
decisions, and have those decisions recognized and implemented. Its formal
creation does not give it political authority in practice. For that to occur, it must
become a political space within which conflicts can be expressed and examined, and

1
The authors benefited from financial support from the following at some point during the research for
this article: Grants to the Watermark Project / Projeto Marca d’Água from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the Fundo Setorial de Recursos
Hídricos / Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology; Grants to the authors from the National
Science Foundation (International Post-Doctoral Fellowship GRANT # 0107314) to Abers; and from
the MacArthur Program on Global Security and Sustainability, Research and Writing Competition to
Abers and Keck. .


where deliberations influence public decisions and state action.2 Among the 14 river
basin committees whose evolution we have followed closely for the last eight years,
some have not gotten off the ground, and others have developed considerable
capacity to mobilize resources and implement actions. Some have gained public
visibility and influence. Some have had spurts of positive action, only to fall back into
relative stasis. Only a very few have ever managed to exercise the statutory powers
they supposedly possess. How can we account for these differences? How do novel
institutional actors construct political authority?
In the case of water policy, the answer to this question is particularly tricky,
because “management” occurs through the complex interactions of a remarkable
number of public and private activities conducted by thirsty individuals, sanitation
companies, dam operators, farmers, industries, tourist enterprises, tree planters and
tree cutters, municipal planners, residents of squatter settlements, golf course
planners, environmental agencies at all levels, energy companies and agencies, and
on and on. However much everyone might agree on the goal of ample quantities of
clean water for all users and uses, in fact there are highly divergent sets of rules and
norms of behavior governing the different kinds of interests involved. Despite
considerable institutional reorganization in the interest of rationalizing and making
more integrated the management of water in Brazil, there are still myriad systems of
institutions, organizations, and rules, with no clear hierarchy among them. Following
the work of Raustiala and Victor (2004), we conceive of this arrangement as a
"regime complex", or an institutional system characterized by a "horizontal,
overlapping structure and the presence of divergent rules and norms" (305). Creating
a new decision-making body within a regime complex raises particular challenges
because authority not only can be vetoed by but also must be recognized by a
multiplicity of actors who likely understand the role of that body in different ways.
In our eight year study of river basin committees, we initially expected that
differences in socioeconomic and political variables on the one hand and in the
characteristic types of water problems of the region on the other would predict the
success or failure of participatory water management bodies. Thus, more developed
regions with greater institutional capacity should produce more successful

2
Much of the literature on collaborative governance institutions focuses exclusively on their capacity to
produce cooperation, and avoids the problem of political authority and power. For a recent critique, see
Moe 2005.


committees; water problems whose solutions provided tangible, selective benefits
were more conducive to successful shared governance than those with high likely
incidence of free riding (diffuse pollution, for example). While not irrelevant, these
explanations did not prove robust. Socioeconomic development and institutional
capacity did not tell us why governments in some states showed no interest in
managing water at all, nor could it explain why committee mobilization and
effectiveness seemed to vary so dramatically within states.
Our next set of explanations focused on the internal processes of committees.
We hypothesized that in some committees, dedicated leaders or core groups made
creative use of resources available to committee members themselves, built social
capital through concrete practices and problem solving, and could then invest that
social capital in larger undertakings. This proved to be quite a robust finding, but still
an insufficient one. It could not show how a movement from essentially voluntary
activity to political authority – and the power to have decisions implemented even in
the face of opposition – could possibly take place.
For the committees to occupy the public role they were set up to play,
cooperation among members did not suffice: there had to be active and reciprocal
engagement with other parts of the water management system, most especially with
the state. The members of these bodies had not only to expand their social capital
by collaborating among themselves but also to develop political capital that could
garner them influence over political decision-making. This, according to Sorenson
and Torfing (2003:610), who are among an emerging group of authors to use this
term, requires gaining 1) “access” to the decision-making processes, 2) “the
capability to make a difference in these processes”, and 3) “the perception of
themselves as political actors” (see also Birner and Wittmer 2003).
In this paper, we explore how local actors built (or failed to build) both social
and political capital in three river basins that we have been studying since 2001,
where the political outcomes of participatory water management differ greatly. In
none of them did the organizing process begin with strong governmental support or
significant resources. In the Paranoá Lake basin, which lies in the central part of
Brazil’s Federal District (Brasília), a group of actors started a movement in 2000 that
successfully brought about new water legislation and a commission to create a river
basin committee. However, lacking both government support and sustained civic
mobilizing, the process stalled and the committee has yet to start functioning. In the


Itajaí river basin, in Santa Catarina State, the state government’s neglect of flood
control precipitated the mobilization of a group of non-state actors. This group
became the catalyst for formation of a basin committee, gradually building the
organizational strength and autonomous fundraising capacity to carry out projects in
all of the basin’s 47 municipalities. Nonetheless, the committee still cannot attract
investment and support from the state government, preventing the kind of large scale
planning and management of water that committees were initially expected to do.
The Velhas river basin committee, in Minas Gerais State, underwent the most
surprising transformation. Hastily created only “on paper” to fulfill the state
government’s commitment to an international lender, it was transformed after being
taken over by an environmentalist civic organization that had built a network of state
and non-state actors throughout the basin.. The state government adopted the
committee’s project of cleaning up the Velhas River and has made major investments
to that end. 3
We proceed as follows. First, we situate our approach theoretically in relation
to scholarship on participatory governance, power and political authority, and regime
complexes. We then describe the reorganization of Brazil’s water resources
management system and the configuration of its components as a “regime complex,”
and place river basin committees within that context. Third, we discuss the evolution
of above three committees, referring occasionally to others. Finally, we attempt to
specify some of the variables whose interaction appear to us crucially important, if
not causally determinant, for explaining the construction of political authority by new
public entities.

Political Authority and Regime Complexes
Most scholarship on participatory deliberative bodies locates them in a kind of
public space in construction, expecting inclusive or collaborative aspects to make a

3
The research was conducted through interviews and document collection over an eight year period,
largely in the context of the Watermark Project. The Watermark Project is a network of researchers at
Brazilian and US Universities that has been accompanying the evolution of river basin institutions
since the beginning of the decade – see www.marcadagua.org.br. In 2001, the Watermark Project
conducted interview and document collection and analysis in 23 river basins, under the coordination of
Abers. In 2004, a sample survey was conducted among members of 14 river basin committees and 4
river basin consortia. The project supported as well the elaboration of 19 master´s and doctoral
dissertations on river basin politics. In depth, semi-strucutred interviews were conducted by Abers,
Keck, and research assistant, Ana Karine Pereira in the Velhas, Itajai, Litoral Norte, and Paranoá
committees in 2001, 2003, and 2007.


political system more democratic, accountable, and publicly minded. The
[democratic] political system, in this view, is heterogeneous, with room for
majoritarian decisional and executive structures, occasions for direct democracy, and
deliberative spaces in which participants attempt to achieve consensus or negotiate
agreements among a wider range of interests and views than would be accurately
reflected in legislatures or state agencies – albeit regarding a limited range of issues.
For many authors, the possibility of greater inclusion, or more effective harmonization
of stakeholder interests, renders instances of direct and/or deliberative democracy
more interesting and in some respects “more democratic” than the more traditional
representative and electoral arenas.
An expanding literature on new deliberative arrangements in Brazil and
elsewhere4 has made it clear, however, that their formal creation does not lead
immediately to a transformation of government decision-making processes. Where
deliberation fails to affect outcomes, it tends to lose legitimacy (Lubell et al. 2005:
280-85), and many erstwhile proponents of stakeholder councils today worry that
they mainly function to legitimate the status-quo. Where this occurs, it seems likely
that societal actors will lose interest. If a potential participant does not think that the
structured public deliberations of participatory governance bodies will produce
results, she will most likely take her energies elsewhere – to an NGO, for example --
unless participating has other benefits, such as affording her an unusually good
platform for voice or for networking. Volunteerism in the service of the public good
must either develop resonance with public authority, or find other, usually private,
resources with which to carry out projects and programs.5
This means that somehow, what goes on in deliberative arenas must affect
the configuration and exercise of power. We understand power in the three-
dimensional sense proposed by Steven Lukes (2005[1974]). With the Pluralists, he
locates power’s first dimension in the ability of those who have it to control the
outcomes of decisions to their benefit; it can be measured by effects. However,
Lukes argued that this view fails to recognize two other important dimensions of

4
See, for example, Abers (2000); Avritzer (2002, 2003); Dagnino (2002); Santos (2002); Santos Jr.,
Queiroz & Azevedo, (2004); and Tatagiba (2002)
5
One of the rather extraordinary threads running throughout our study of river basin committees is the
remarkable and sustained level of activism by people who, committed to sustainable water
management, continue to try to harness their energies to a public project – despite the continued lack
of commitment from state authorities.


power. A second form is present in the ways that the position of actors in social
structures allows them to control what issues come onto the agenda. This power
laden process of agenda formation predates the kinds of political competitions that
result in winners and losers. This version of power was proposed by elite theorists
such as C.Wright Mills (1956) and Bachrach and Baratz (1970). Finally, Lukes notes,
the ability to shape which issues are to be understood as political issues at all is also
a form of power. Such a version of power incorporates a Gramscian understanding of
the role of ideology. Thus power involves outcomes, positions, and cognitive framing.
For a new decision-making institution to actually have political authority, it must be
able to influence outcomes, to define agendas, and to become a source or arena for
defining which issues are politically relevant.
New political arenas may lack power for two reasons. On the one hand, they
may lack internal resources: their members may not have what Sorenson and Torfing
(2003) call political capital – or the political rights, resources and competencies that
allow them to gain influence over political decisions. On the other hand, such arenas
are inserted in political spaces that may fail to recognize them or that may even veto
their attempt to influence the actions other actors – making decisions, for example,
about the projects and programs state agencies that should be allowed to implement
or the rules about private behavior that state agencies should enforce. This problem
is typically discussed in the literature on participation as related to the political will6 or
political interests7 of the state agency that are supposed to devolve power to
participatory arenas. Our research on water politics suggest that the problem can be
much more complicated than one of devolution from one power holding body to
another, because in many policy arenas, power is not concentrated in the hands of a
single public agency (Abers, 2007; Abers and Keck, 2008,forthcoming).
Although participatory governance bodies are frequently studied on their own,
they are almost always part of much larger sets of inter-institutional relations. Water
resource management takes place (or fails to) within a remarkably complex issue
area, in which institutional interactions occur at multiple levels of the political system,
both horizontally and vertically, and moreover include among their principal actors
powerful private interests. Coordination problems abound: the definition of the

6
Avritzer (2003), for example, suggests that a key factor in the success of Participatory Budget
policies is the existence of a participatory political project in the local government.
7
Abers (2000, 2003), for example, suggests that participatory policies are only likely to be
implemented if doing so is understood by state actors as in their own political interest.


system itself is contested both actively and passively; different components of the
system operate according to different definitions, play by different rules, and have
different interests and goals; and the practical coordination of decisions involved in
resolving any given dispute normally require the interaction of multiple components.
This kind of complexity is constitutive of what Raustiala and Victor call a
regime complex: “an array of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions
governing a particular issue area”(2004: 279). This conception seems to describe
well those political projects that seek to integrate previously distinct institutions,
actors, and policy arenas. Such configurations combine distinct fora, in each of
which different sets of actors act according to expectations drawn from different legal
stipulations and institutional arrangements. Although clearly interconnected,
agreements reached in one forum do not necessarily extend to another, nor is there
a well-defined hierarchy according to which one set of decisions trumps another
(Ibid.). 8
Raustiala and Victor propose that the evolutionary dynamics of regime
complexes differ in a variety of ways from those of institutional arrangements with
more established definitions and boundaries.
“In a regime complex…negotiations over most substantive rules
commence with an elaborate and dispersed institutional framework
already in place. The institutional slate is not clean. Ideas, interests, and
expectations frequently are already aligned around some set of existing
rules and concepts, though these rules and concepts can and do
contradict one another - especially when underlying interests are
contested and in flux. Consequently, power, interests, and ideas do not
directly map onto the norms that become enshrined in the agreements at
the core of the regime; the content and evolution of rules does not trace
neatly back to changes in the underlying driving forces (Ibid., 296).”

Several characteristics of regime complexes raise challenges for the proposal
that one component within them should be transformed into a central source of
decision-making. First, Raustiala and Victor note that ambiguity about the roles and
rules of different institutions favors powerful actors in a position to shop around for
the most favorable venue through which to advance their interests (Ibid., 299-300)
Second, change is more likely to result from the working out of problems arising
8
Although Raustiala and Victor develop the concept of “regime complexes” in a study of international
interactions around plant genetic resources, their formulation draws upon the work of scholars of
domestic public policy, in particular Helen Ingram’s work on water politics in the United States;
however well these insights may have traveled into the international arena, we find that they continue
to illuminate highly interdependent domestic policy arenas as well.


between components of the system than from reform decisions at the level of any
single component or the system’s coordinating architecture (Ibid:300-302) . Third,
the myriad inconsistencies in a complex institutional arrangement are more likely to
be reconciled in practice, through the implementation of projects and programs, than
through overarching harmonization attempts (Ibid:302-305). Thus although the
norms and rules embedded in the system’s design are clearly important and worthy
of our attention, much of the system’s evolutionary impulse will work through
incremental changes, from the bottom up.
This suggests that even when new institutions are created with ambiguous
roles in a regime complex, actors within them can develop strategies to try to
enhance their political authority. Indeed, it would seem very unlikely in such contexts
that an overarching power would ever “devolve” power to any component – power
needs to be created. Our examination of river basin committees suggests that this is
an arduous but necessary task: only where local actors within new deliberative
institutions struggled to build their own social and political capital were they able to
redefine the political authority of those institutions. Where they waited for the state to
devolve power to them, it rarely happened on its own.

Water Resource Management as Regime Complex
Up to the 1990s, such water “management” as took place in Brazil was
scattered, inconsistent, and specific to particular sectors or uses (dams, irrigation,
sanitation, etc.), and to wealthier regions. Water in Brazil can be in either state or
federal domain,9 and at both levels, dozens of specialized agencies implemented
their own agendas with little coordination. Municipalities, largely responsible for land
use, were rarely consulted by any of these state or federal agencies. Taking
advantage of the relative abundance of freshwater in some parts of the country,
private firms and public agencies encouraged the development of a highly
sophisticated hydrology and civil engineering capacity. Large dams fueled
developmentalist visions, and the focus on water for energy crowded out other
perspectives for most of the 20th century. For a long time, problems were addressed
from the narrow perspective of a particular sector, agency, or set of users. Private
users in a largely unregulated environment had little incentive to avoid pollution,

9
Bodies of water that run along or across state or international borders belong to the Union.


conserve water, or rationalize use. Environmental agencies and NGOs had few
instruments to ensure that as multiple uses competed for water, biodiversity was not
threatened. Although some effort was made to develop a more integrated approach
in some parts of the country, what few successes there were did not generate
multiplier effects.
By the mid-1980s, however, competition over water for drinking and
household use, waste dilution, hydroelectric power, and irrigation was evident in
some regions. Challengers to traditional engineering approaches to flood control and
drought drew sustenance from the repeated ravages of both. Water experts explored
new ideas, and many began to believe that a different, more holistic approach was
required. Proponents of reform drew upon ideas developed over the course of
decades of international meetings on water issues; some of them were active
participants in these debates. The emerging model, sometimes known as Integrated
Water Resource Management (IWRM) (see Conca, 2005), comprised a set of
principles that included management of water for multiple uses, planning decisions to
be made at the river basin level where possible, participation of affected actors, and
(most controversially) recognition of water as a resource with economic value, for
whose use and maintenance users should pay (Barth, 1998: 1).10
Beginning with São Paulo in 1991, most states outside Amazonia promulgated
legislation incorporating these principles over the next decade or so, and a Federal
Water law along these lines passed in 1997. The statutes provided for integrated
management of water supply and quality, identified the river basin as the appropriate
territorial unit for water resources planning and decision-making, and defined
organizational mechanisms for stakeholder participation in decisions at federal, state
and river basin levels. The system was to generate its own revenues through the
imposition of bulk water charges (cobrança) on major water users (industries,
sanitation companies, electric companies and irrigators) for the amount of water they
use, as well as for polluting discharges. Unlike taxes, however, these revenues were
to remain in the river basin where they were collected. Further, because
representatives of bulk water users would have seats on basin committees, they

10
Ascribing economic value to water resources does not mean fully commodifying them; it does mean
that the cost of the resource itself, and not just its delivery and disposal, must be incorporated into the
planning and budgeting of both public and private actors. The Brazilian government rejected
recommendations from institutions like the World Bank that it adopt a system of water markets on the
Chilean model.


could influence the uses to which these revenues were put, transforming the water
charges into a form of investment.
River basin committees were expected to set guidelines and priorities,
determine pricing criteria for water charges, establish spending priorities for
revenues, and approve or set up executive “basin agencies” to carry out these
decisions. Still, virtually any planning for water management required the
cooperation of myriad municipal and state government agencies and a state level
deliberative council on water resources, each of which had its own agenda,
resources, and powers. More than 140 river basin committees have been created
under a variety of state laws, in addition to seven committees in federal river
basins.11
In the context of a system comprising institutions with radically divergent
capacities, resources, and histories, the decision to establish a system of integrated
water management by river basin cannot really be called a case of decentralization
by devolution. River basin committees could not simply “take over” responsibility for
planning and decisions that previously, when made at all, had been scattered among
a multitude of different agencies and jurisdictions, at municipal, state, and federal
levels (and often remain among the attributions of these agencies to this day). Very
few state governments had either the information or the human capacity to monitor
water use, let alone enforce directives to guide its development. Further, despite the
fanfare with which many water committees were established, resources essential to
their functioning were scarce, late, or nonexistent. Implementation of cobrança ran
into a plethora of legal and political obstacles; further, it soon became clear that only
in a small number of wealthy river basins would it produce enough revenue to be
worth the cost of implementing it. The new system is replete with jurisdictional
ambiguities.
In this unlikely context, it is not surprising that the general view of river basin
committees amongst water experts is pessimistic. Lacking effective incentives or
sanctions, committees have no recourse when state governments simply ignore their
plans and priorities, or bypass them altogether on water management decisions.12
They seem like little more than the weakest link in an extraordinarily weak system,
doomed to failure from the start. Yet not all committees fail, and some of them start

11
http://www.cnrh-srh.gov.br/, accessed on 11/06/08
12
Neves (2004) demonstrates that the vast majority of river basin plans are never implemented.


badly, yet somehow find their footing. As a formally created institution that has space
for a variety of different actors, even toothless committees can sometimes become
arenas for generating and mobilizing resources and eventually even for transforming
what the state does and can do (Abers and Keck, 2008 forthcoming).
Of all of the components of the new water management regime complex, river
basin committees probably elicit the most diverse range of expectations both from
their members and from other actors in the system. Although state and federal water
laws speak to their legal domain of activity and attributions, they are only as vital and
as powerful as they are made to be by their members, and as their interlocutors in
other parts of the system recognize them as being. Unlike institutional components
of the regime complex with specialized jurisdictions, the river basin committees are
charged with oversight of the big picture in their territorial domain. Their job is to plan
and establish priorities for other private and public actors. They were not really
intended to propose and carry out projects of their own – this was to be the task of
their executive agencies, few of which have been established. Moreover, part of the
justification for assigning the planning and priority-setting function to the basin
committees was the fact that their makeup was designed to reproduce in microcosm,
the range of public and private components in the regime complex that were present
in the river basin. Thus at the same time as they exemplify an arena that brings
together, theoretically, all the organizations - public agencies, private stakeholders
and representatives of diffuse interests (civil society organizations) – involved in and
affected by water management, they are also public entities that must coordinate with
other organizations in the water management system.
This dual nature of the river basin committees – in which they are both pieces
of a complex system and microcosms of the whole – underpins paradoxically both
the committees’ weaknesses and their strengths. Members of the committee
representing state agencies and private sector actors can rarely make major
decisions binding upon the organization they represent. On the other hand, precisely
because they bring together actors from throughout the system, when committees do
gain influence, that influence can have ripple effects throughout the system. The
newness of the committees, and the ambiguity and variation in expectations about
them, probably makes them the main terrain of experimentation within the regime
complex. But their ability to transform water management more broadly – for
example, by promoting integrated water management among diverse organizations


in the system -- depends on the degree to which these “bottom-up” impulses can
energize the coordination and implementation capacity of other actors in the system
with the power and resources to pursue their goals.
In the following sections, we discuss the political evolution of three river basin
committees in Brazil in order to look at how actors within the committees dealt with
this paradoxical position within the regime complex for the construction of political
authority. We chose these three cases because they demonstrate the diversity of
trajectories that new decision-making arenas can undergo when examined over a
reasonably long period of time (both the Itajai and Velhas committees were created
more than a decade ago). In particular they suggest caution in labeling an
organization a “success” or a “failure”: it seems that a set of factors can recombine in
different ways over time resulting in different and changing results.

The Itajai River Basin Committee
The Itajai River Basin Committee is the only one of the three that began with
civil society organization. The Itajaí River flows from the interior of Santa Catarina
state in the south of Brazil to the sea, about a hundred kilometers north of the state
capital, Florianópolis. With an economy of middle-sized farming, artisanship and
small industry, the region is characterized by much lower levels of social inequality
and poverty than in most of Brazil. The total population of the basin is about one
million (Projeto Marca d’Água, 2003). Devastating floods have long plagued the
region, and efforts in the 1970s-80s by the National Department of Sanitation Works
(DNOS- Departamento Nacional de Obras de Saneamento) to control them with
contention dams proved inadequate. In the 1980s, work by a group of professors at
the FURB (Fundação Universidade Regional de Blumenau), spurred a group of local
organizations to contest DNOS’s approach, arguing that engineering solutions
needed to be complemented with reforestation and other soft measures throughout
the drainage area. This required an approach to water management from the
perspective of the entire river basin.
In the 1990s, a series of events created opened a window of opportunity for
basin-wide organizing.13 In 1992, two years after the government had abolished
DNOS, a devastating flood demonstrated the urgent need for investment in flood

13
On political opportunity structure, see McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1994.


control. In 1994, following the example of São Paulo, the Santa Catarina State
Assembly passed a water law, which called for creation of Basin Committees. Two
years later, participants in a meeting of civic and university groups called by
Blumenau’s Commercial and Industrial Association concluded that the new law
afforded them an opportunity to undertake the kind of basin-wide organizing which
some had long proposed. The water specialists at FURB immediately took a
leadership role (Mais, 2001).
Within a few months, the group had put together an informal Basin Committee,
made official by government decree a year later. The Committee had 65 members,
representing water users, civic organizations, universities, municipal governments
and state agencies. It started by convening organizations from around the basin to
come up with plans to solving specific problems, and then working together to seek
state or federal support to get the plans implemented. The first years of the
committee´s existence were dedicated largely to the organization of workshops
bringing committee members together to discuss and eventually consolidate a vision
of water management based on a series of “soft” measures (such as reforestation)
that contested the state government’s traditional approach to flood control, based on
heavy infrastructure in the river channel (Mais, 2001).
With no funding proffered for this alternative approach, in 2001, committee
members decided to move forward by pooling the resources of the local
organizations - the university (which also housed and bankrolled the committee’s
secretariat), the commercial association, and the municipalities in the basin (though
most of these were severely underfunded themselves). The resulting “Riverbank
Reforestation Program” involved forestry research, training courses for municipal
employees, and partnerships with 10 municipal governments for reforestation
projects.14 The Committee also organized an environmental education campaign, a
yearly program called “Water Week” (Semana da Água), in which schools,
community associations and other civic groups planned a variety of actions. Once
again, the Committee worked primarily as a coordinator of other organizations, with
few outside resources. Water Week involved 76,000 people in the first year,
organized in almost 500 local groups. In subsequent years participants have
numbered around 200,000 (including school children), representing about one fifth of

14
http://www.comiteitajai.org.br, accessed on Sept. 4, 2004.


the basin’s total population. Besides its educational purposes, the Water Week
greatly raised the Committee’s public profile, and its capacity to mobilize resources in
the following years.
In 2004, a major injection of resources allowed the committee to take its
activities to a new level. By that time, the committee had created an “executive
branch”, called a Water Agency. The agency won a national competition for
environmental projects promoted by the state owned Petroleum Company,
PETROBRAS. The resulting grant made it possible to build upon existing work in
environmental education and reforestation, and to add a major component designed
to help municipal governments create their own local environmental councils and
implement reforestation activities, for which the project provided training and some
investment. The presence of more than twenty paid organizers, backed by the
weight of the PETROBRAS name, who worked with municipal officials and could
provide money (albeit small amounts) for local projects, vastly expanded the
committee’s reputation and reach. This new phase of the committee represents an
important step forward in terms of resource mobilization: if in the early phase, the
committee moved forward by getting the members of the committee themselves to
donate their own resources to the cause, now the group has developed substantial
fundraising capacities, allowing it to generate resources from outside the
membership, indeed, from outside the region.
Yet, although individuals interviewed in 2007 were generally satisfied that the
committee had gained in public recognition and legitimacy acquired as a result of the
PETROBRAS project, most remained frustrated by the lack of state support for the
endeavor. The committee was still operating overwhelmingly on the basis of
voluntary civic action – it was, for all intents and purposes, playing the role of an
NGO. Even though several state employees do dedicate time to committee
activities, most do so as “committed individuals”- they do not bring with them state
resources, policies or programs.
In late 2007, in an attempt to move forward in this regard, Committee
leadership proposed a partnership with the state government to establish a water
user registry. Such registries, the first step in any broad based effort at planning and
regulation, still do not exist in a great many Brazilian states and, according to Itajai
leadership, state water official doubted that they could to create one without
resources. The committee proposal was to start with a volunteer, on-line registry. The


government provided some personnel, the software, and an official decree calling for
users to sign up. The Committee members did the mobilization on the ground,
disseminating information about the registry and encouraging users to sign up. In the
end, more than 8500 users voluntarily registered. Finally, after a decade of struggle,
the committee now had access to the most basic instrument for planning water use: a
data base on who uses water, how much and where.

The Velhas Committee
The Rio das Velhas Basin Committee started out on a completely different
track from the one just described. The kinds of nongovernmental actors that
animated the Itajaí process were barely in evidence in the process of creating the
committee. Yet, from its inauspicious beginnings as a committee in name only, it
developed into one of the system’s most effective – again with a central role for
university-based environmentalists.
The Rio das Velhas river basin in Minas Gerais has an estimated population of
about four million people, concentrated in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte,
Brazil's third largest city. After flowing north through Belo Horizonte, the river passes
through a poor and sparsely populated region of extensive agriculture and ranching,
finally meeting the São Francisco river 761 kilometers from its source. Until 2001,
there was no sewage treatment in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan region, and the
city’s waste left downstream stretches of the river significantly degraded. In the early
1990s the state government proposed to address this problem by means of a World
Bank loan to build two sewage treatment plants and other sanitation infrastructure in
Belo Horizonte. The loan agreement stipulated that a small portion of funds be
dedicated to improving water management more generally, including the creation of a
Basin Agency. With the project in its final stages in 1997, the state government
needed to fulfill the water management component of its contract. Since the state’s
1994 water law required that a Basin Committee be created before a Basin Agency
could be established, the Rio das Velhas Committee was quickly cobbled together in
late 1997. Little more than a “paper Committee,” for several years its meetings could
not attract a quorum even to approve bylaws and elect an executive board. Setting
up a Basin Agency thus proved to be far beyond its capacities and the sanitation
works ended up going forward without one.


Around the same time, a new civic group called Projeto Manuelzao began a
series of watershed restoration initiatives, whose importance soon eclipsed the
official River Basin committee. This group began when professors in charge of a
rural internship program at the Medical School of the Federal University of Minas
Gerais, led by Apolo Heringer, a doctor with a history of political organizing, decided
to use the program to promote a more environmental perspective on health. Interns
showed community groups the connection between water conditions and disease,
and helped organize river clean-ups and popular education efforts. This experience
rapidly expanded into the largest civil society program for river conservation in the
state. Within a few years, the Manuelzão Project (named after a legendary twentieth-
century figure who traveled the region’s hinterlands) comprised 14 sub-projects,
ranging from research to eco-tourism to environmental education in schools. Part of
this effort included the creation of a network of local government officials, civic
organizers, business owners and other local leaders throughout the river basin
through formation of community or municipal-level Comitês Manuelzão or Manuelzão
Committees (Sousa, 2004: 108). The project provided the committees with
professionals to analyze water problems, legal assistance to support public exposés
of abusive practices, transportation and other help organizing events, and so on.
Today there are over 80 Manuelzão Committees in the basin’s 51 municipalities.
Alongside this highly decentralized organizing effort, the Manuelzão Project
formed dozens of higher-level partnerships, mostly with public institutions such as the
state forestry agency and the state sanitation company. These partnerships usually
provided support to projects the agencies had already initiated, involving activities
ranging from technical studies of a particular water problem, to visits to schools and
community projects. In effect, the Project connected under one “umbrella” a multitude
of activities, producing a degree of integration that might not have existed otherwise.
It took several years before people involved in the Manuelzão Project began to
get seriously involved in the Velhas River Basin Committee. The committee slowly
began to get off the ground in 2000, when Belo Horizonte’s municipal environmental
secretary, Paulo Maciel, a water specialist, became its president. Under his
leadership, the Committee took the first steps towards creating a Basin Agency, by
installing a Technical Office to support planning and data collection. The committee
also began to exercise one of the most powerful attributions accorded basin


committees by Minas Gerais state water law,15 that is, to analyze and pass judgment
on permits for water uses with high pollution potential. The chance to influence water
permitting attracted the interest of the Manuelzão leadership. In 2001, when open
assemblies were held for organizations in each category16 to elect new
representatives to the Committee, Manuelzão sought to get enough of its own
affiliates onto the Committee to be able to elect Apolo Heringer as president.
Although Maciel retained his office in that election, Heringer won a majority in 2003
and was reelected in 2005.
In early 2004, Heringer brought the Manuelzão Project’s latest campaign to
the Committee, effectively providing it with an agenda and a deadline around which
different sets of activities could be organized. Meta 2010, or Target 2010 promotes
collaboration of state government, the legislature, municipal governments and water
users in a major partnership to make it possible to ‘navigate, fish and swim’ in the
Velhas River by the end of the decade. In March 2004, Minas Governor Aécio Neves
signed an agreement committing the state government to the program, and
numerous state deputies and private businesses declared their support as well. On
December 10, 2004 the Velhas basin committee approved a water resources plan
geared towards meeting the target (Jornal Manuelzão, 2004).
The Minas governor’s espousal of the 2010 target meant that the planning
process undertaken in the basin committee would have resonance in actual policy.
This was a major commitment, involving the construction of waste treatment plants
and sewage interceptors in the major sub-basins of the Belo Horizonte metropolitan
area, as well as watershed restoration, environmental education and extension
services, and the establishment of a network of monitoring stations to keep track of
water quality.
As part of this process, the Committee began to create operational subgroups,
including subcommittees (beginning with Ribeirão da Onça, one of the most polluted
sections of the river, and followed by five others in 2006 and more thereafter), and
specialized commissions on water charges and permits, legal and institutional affairs,

15
Minas Gerais is the only Brazilian state where basin committees must authorize large water permits.
Such permits are a prerequisite for obtaining authorization for any economic activity that will use
substantial amounts directly from water sources.

16
The 28 seats on the Velhas committee are allocated to representatives of state government,
municipal governments, water users, and civil society, of which categories has 7 seats or 25% of the
total.


planning and projects, and communication. In March 2007, the committee’s proposal
that the Associação Executiva de Apoio à Gestão de Bacias Hidrográficas Peixe Vivo
(AGB-Peixe Vivo) be authorized to serve as its Basin Agency was approved by the
State Water Resource Council. Nonetheless, it was clear that even with a
developing capacity to initiate water charging and an executive agency to do the job,
the potential cobrança revenues (estimated at around 50 million reais) remained
vastly inferior to the kind of spending necessary to meet the targets established in the
plan (estimated at around a billion reais) (Jasper e Alkmin 2007: 6). Most of the
costs for basin cleanup have to be borne by the state government – a responsibility
that at least for the moment, it remains formally ready to assume, in marked contrast
to the government of Santa Caterina discussed above.

The Paranoá Lake Basin
Our third case is a counter example to both the Itajai and the Velhas cases.
In both of those river basins, significant and sustained civic activism moved a water
agenda forward and associated it with river basin committees, despite absent or
lukewarm state support in the initial phases. In the Paranoá case, by contrast, an
initially enthusiastic mobilization of civil society actors fizzled in the face of
government disinterest. The Paranoá basin lies in the center of the Federal District
of Brasília, whose construction included the damming of the Paranoá river to create a
lake in a region notably short of water resources. The Lake’s purpose was a
combination of humidity control and sewage dilution for what was intended as a city
of no more than 500,000. The area of the lake’s drainage basin corresponds to
almost the entirety of the planned portion of the Federal District17. Indeed, original
plans considered the boundaries of the basin to also be the boundaries of planned
urbanization.
Brasília’s population quickly spilled over its planned boundaries; shanty towns
gradually became “satellite cities”. Brasília’s population now approaches 2 million,
about six hundred thousand of which live within the Paranoá Basin. The
shantytowns are not the only irregular settlements in the region; others are middle
class gated communities (condomínios) for the tens of thousands of public

17
Since the lake was dammed close to where it flows into the São Bartolomeu, the drainage area of
the lack is only a little smaller than that of the river. This is the only river in the small Federal District
that does not cross over into neighboring states, making it the only one fully under the Federal
District’s dominion.


employees who can no longer afford to live in the center city. This growth threatens
the ability of the Paranoá basin system to keep up with the needs for sewage
treatment – despite the existence of some of the most advanced treatment plants in
the country. By now, most of the water consumed in the basin is imported from
neighboring rivers. Unique institutional aspects of the Federal District, whose
government combines attributions of state and municipal jurisdictions, also bring land
use issues in closer contact with water issues.
Historically, the Federal District has had fairly strong institutions in the area of
sanitation, but politically weak environmental organizations. The District Water
Company, CAESB, with a well-qualified bureaucracy and significant resources,
controlled water management issues. The Federal District was quick to enact a
water law, along the lines of the São Paulo example and revised in 2000 to make it
consistent with the 1997 Federal statute. The sponsoring deputy, Rodrigo
Rollemberg, was an important member of the opposition to the conservative governor
Joaquim Roriz, who had dominated Brasilia’s politics since the Federal District
gained political autonomy in the late 1980s.18 After this initial success, Gustavo
Souto Maior, a well-known environmentalist, and Paulo Salles, a biology professor at
the Federal University of Brasilia, both of whom were advisors to Rollemberg, set out
to mobilize support for creating the first River Basin Committee in the District. In
2000-2001, a politically diverse array of people from local universities,
environmentalist NGOs, community organizations, sports groups, industries, along
with a few state government employees working for the most part on their own time,
held regular meetings and collected more than 50 letters of support from public and
private water institutions, especially large water users. In November 2001, the
Commission to Create the Paranoá Committee was officially created, reserving a
third of the seats each for representatives of government, civil society and users. To
allay the governor’s concerns that the opposition would dominate the committee, a
high-level official of his environmental secretariat was made Executive Secretary of
the Commission, and the government announced that the committee would be
inaugurated by the following April.
In fact, it took five more years, and although the committee’s creation was
announced in 2006, only recently has the mobilization process begun for elections to

18
Before this period, the Federal District was under the control of the federal government.


the seats. Participants in the 2000-2001 process blame the district government for
stalling, accepting the initiative in word, but in not in deed. Legal complications made
this relatively easy. However, the 2000 statutory revision had also complicated
matters by giving power to create river basin committees to the District Water Council
– which was not formed until late 2002. During this period of impasse, the original
group dissipated. Because its goal had been to create a water committee rather than
to address particular problems of water management, it had no agenda of its own. In
this respect, it differed from the groups that animated the activities of the Itajaí and
Velhas committees. Oddly enough, the group rarely discussed substantive issues
related to water; instead, the focus was on the desirability of an arena where non-
state actors could have a voice in environmental decision-making. Some
participants, interviewed recently by Luiza Alencastro (2008, personal
communication), attribute this to the fact that the federal district’s water related
problems do not yet seem urgent. The government has kept up with the need for
infrastructure investment, both with regard to sanitation and drinking water. Other
specialists disagree, predicting that huge, impoverished settlements in the basin are
depleting the supply of well water at alarming rates, raising the possibility that
problems might appear much sooner than expected.

From Social Capital to Political Capital?
Despite much fanfare in the late 1990s, the odds seemed to be against the
emergence of river basin committees as vibrant arenas where politically important
decisions would get made and actions taken. For the many who expected that the
prominent role granted these committees in new legislation would soon make them
central actors in a system of water management by governance, the fact that so
many committees spent years getting off the ground was profoundly disillusioning
(Abers and Dino, 2005). Certainly the expectation was exaggerated in the first
place. Water committees were only one component of a complex system, many of
whose other components either did not exist or did not perform in the ways intended
by the system’s designers. Further, the “integrated management” of water resources
involves the adjudication of powerful state, private sector, and civic interests; it is
therefore a thoroughly political proposition. Yet, the legislation and the new
institutional arrangements required to make this integration happen were put into
place with very little attention to the political support that would be necessary to make


them real (Abers and Keck, 2005). In fact, for many of the water engineers
endorsing the new system, the whole idea was to insulate decision-making on water
management from politics, understood as unabashedly self-interested partisan
behavior by politicians. But the very notion of managing water in the public interest
requires the political construction of the public concerned. Unexpectedly, we
believe, it is precisely this job in which many of the water committees we have been
studying have been engaged.
The Watermark Project has accompanied the development of fourteen river
basin committees over the last eight years, along with shorter case studies of others
(see Formiga-Johnsson and Lopes, 2003; and Fidelman, 2008). The comparison of
these cases demonstrates a tremendous variety of starting points, trajectories and
results – suggesting at the very least that we should abandon the idea that just
because committees are born with few resources and little power, they are doomed
to irrelevance. Although many committees have progressed well beyond the mere
formal installation that the Paranoá Lake committee has barely achieved, few have
become central site in which important government decisions are negotiated and
through which resources for implementation are mobilized, as occurred -- eventually -
- in the Velhas River Basin. Most are somewhere in the middle, in that a committee
became an important political actor in the field of water management, but not a
central decision-making forum for the state. Generally, the problem is not that state
governments oppose basin committees’ performing such a role; it is that most give so
little priority to water management that no there is no publicly recognized role for
such a body to play.
Even though the committees in this middle group do not look like the
authoritative “Parliament of the Waters” that their proponents imagined, they may still
be the most relevant regional or state actors in the field of water management, if only
by elimination, as the only organizations that consistently struggle to keep water
management on the political agenda. This anomalous situation raises a number of
interesting political questions. What keeps them going in the absence of support
from the other components of the “regime complex” of which they were supposed to
be apart? What kinds of resources and strategies are available to them to influence
that context, in the hope of gaining the political relevance and authority they were
supposed to have?


Our research suggests that those committees that moved forward did so by
mobilizing the social capital and other resources (technical capability, money)
available to them and using it to build political capital. How does this occur? In a
variety of cases, we find that the groups involved started small, with concrete projects
supported by the resources of the people involved. In the Itajai Basin these were a
series of workshops to define solutions to problems and eventually the creation of a
project to promote that solution (based largely on the reforestation of river banks),
funded by the university and civic groups. In the Velhas basin, the Manuelzão project
branched out from a university internship project to mobilize dozens of local groups
around problems specific to each place: domestic waste from an impoverished
riverside settlement, erosion caused by sand mining, risk of overflowing residue
tanks of an iron mine, chronic dysentery in an urban shantytown. These kinds of
practical actions seem to be essential for building trust among actors, demonstrating
capacity for action, and creating a public name and legitimacy. In the Paranoá Lake
basin, where leadership failed to establish such a practical mission, and where, in the
absence of legal recognition, nothing else remained to bring people together, the
initial mobilization effort dissipated.19
What transpires through this kind of practical, collaborative action? We believe
that working together on small projects affords the opportunity to build and
strengthen networks among committee members and those they attract to their
activities. Broadening these networks in turn amplifies the committee’s resource
base, and eventually, we argue, its power. Networks in this case are structures
comprising linkages among individuals and/or groups, through which flow ideas,
information, and material resources. Nan Lin (2001a,2001b) argues that they are
closely related to social capital. Robert Putnam famously defined social capital as
“features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve
the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action” (1993: 167). Lin contends
that the concept of social capital involves more than of the trust and reciprocity on

19
These examples are not unique. We have observed the mobilizing effect of such concrete practices
in a substantial number of river basins studied by the watermark project: The Rio dos Sinos basin
committee developed an environmental education project with local schools. In the Araçuaí basin
(Minas Gerais), committee activities have revolved around designing and monitoring a World Bank
funded basic sanitation project. In São Paulo, deliberated over the allocation of monies from
FEHIDRO, a state fund for water management projects, has helped mobilize actors and creating a
starting point from which to move on to more ambitious projects.


which Putnam focuses. Social capital for Lin is investible, defined as “resources
embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive
actions” (Lin 2001b: 12). That is, through networks, people can call upon different
kinds of resources held by other network members to make collective action more
powerful and effective.
By approaching social capital in this way, we can understand political
practices as navigating the ground between agency and structure. The structural
position of different actors affects their access to resources (Sewell, 1992). But actors
can deal with that structural endowment in a multiplicity of ways. When people with
different resources begin to work together, they discover ways to combine those
resources in new ways and transform their resources as a group. When actors from
very different networks begin to interact, this potential is particularly strong (though
by no means inevitable). The multiplexity of networks, product of the variety of
experiences and affiliations of each network member, facilitates access to different
kinds of resources and structures (Sewell 1992).
River basin committees – along with other similar deliberative arenas – may
be fertile ground for such network building possibilities. Although as organizations,
they have little formal power and few external resources, they do bring together a
wide variety of actors connected to a multiplicity of networks: industries, local political
groups, environmentalist, university researchers, and so on. This potential, however,
must be activated. As long as those multiple actors see no reason to act together, it
is unlikely that networks be connected and new resources generated. That is why
initial, small scale practices seem to be so important: by demonstrating that the group
has a capacity to act, they help build credibility and confidence for more ambitious
projects.
This sort of resource-pooling can help build internal trust and capacity, but
does not necessarily build political capital. Political capital is accrued insofar as the
activities of a committee extend beyond its members to mobilize parts of the public in
support of its goals, and influence the ideas and behavior of politicians and public
officials. This requires the development of projects that demand concrete, credible
commitments – which are only likely insofar as the projects can be made politically
meaningful to those whose support was needed.
One key source of political capital is visibility and public credibility, promoted
by certain types of activities more than others. The Manuelzão project invested


heavily in public communication, with a widely disseminated newsletter and regular
appearances in the news media, with careful attention to the message being
presented. For example, in calling upon Governor Neves to speed up the
implementation of Target 2010, Heringer publically reminded him of the state’s
renowned history of meeting targets, from the challenge of moving the capital from
Ouro Preto to Belo Horizonte in 4 years, to Juscelino Kubitschek’s race to build
Brasilia and develop Brazil (Lisboa 2008:4) The Itajai committee was much less
successful in this respect, but nonetheless has worked hard to involve municipal
governments in its projects. Efforts such as Water Week mobilized huge numbers of
people at a relatively low cost (by working through schools) and disseminated the
Committee´s name in the early period. Like Manuelzão, by involving large numbers
of ordinary citizens in watershed restoration activities the committee helped it gain
public visibility.
Outside recognition also seems to provide credibility and legitimacy that
strengthens a committee´s claim to political authority. Interviewees in the Itajai basin
repeatedly noted that the support from PETROBRAS for the committee made local
people see that it was a “serious” organization.
Similarly, the existence of legislation creating committees and giving them
formal attributions, however vague or weak it may be, remains a source of political
capital. In the Itajai basin, university researchers and other local people had been
trying for over a decade to organize people in the basin around the problem of flood
control to no avail. But when in 1994, the state followed São Paulo in the passage of
a water law that created River Basin Committees, the group had a new organizing
tool. Local actors believed that an officially recognized committee would have a
greater ability to pressure the state. Although the state government has remained
resistant, the committee’s official status is still a political asset allowing it to make
claims for political authority. The leaders of the Projeto Manuelzão group, by
contrast, initially saw no reason to expect that the rather feeble basin committee
being set up at the same time as it was forming could provide them with more
credibility or legitimacy than they could build on their own. But at a key point in the
Project´s development, attachment to an organization that had formal political
authority seemed politically useful. By transforming the Target 2010 into a legally
approved plan, the Committee was able to demand that it be implemented in a way
that was not available to the Manuelzão Project. Like the Itajai activists, the


Manuelzão leaders wanted to be more than just an NGO: they used the formal status
of the committee to give greater political legitimacy to their actions.
Not surprisingly, the ability of actors participating in these new arenas to gain
political capital is also strongly related to party politics. The contrast between the
Paranoá basin and the Velhas basin makes this clear. In Paranoá, the effort to
promote the committee was spearheaded by advisors to an opposition politician. In
this situation, there was little reason for the local government administration to
support the project. In Velhas, on the other hand, the leadership of the Manuelzão
project had political connections. Interviews repeatedly cited the close connections
between Apolo Heringer Lisboa and high level political officials in the state
government, especially the state secretary of the environment and Aecio Neves, the
governor. The predominance of progressive (PT, PSB, PSDB) state and city
governments for most of the period under consideration here provided opportunities
that were not available to the Itajai activists, who faced a much less congenial set of
governors.
Party politics seems especially important in river basins in close proximity to
state capitals. In Minas Gerais, the fact that the Velhas basin included the state
capital Belo Horizonte amplified the importance of political networks linking Projeto
Manuelzão leaders and state government officials.20 The Itajai activists did not have
the same kinds of political assets, but did have strong social ties in the region around
Blumenau, and were well connected both with regional environmentalist networks
and the national technical networks of water engineers. It may be that for them,
location outside the capital made developing high levels of local visibility and capacity
less problematic for state political elites than it might otherwise have been. Different
kinds of resources and trajectories, then, can be mobilized for different purposes.
Figure 1 is an attempt to visually summarize the complex interrelationship of
variables discussed here. As Raustiala and Victor (2004) suggest, in regime
complexes change is likely to occur at least as much through bottom-up experiments
with policy implementation as through policy coordination from the top. River basin
committees and similar deliberative arenas seem to be ideal for such

20
Apolo Heringer Lisboa was a founding member of the Workers’ Party, had been a well-known
student radical, and vice president of the National Student Union (UNE) in 1966. One of his more
notable acts of the period was, upon receiving his diploma in medicine in December 1967, to dedicate
it to the memory of Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia just two months earlier. Exiled in
1973, he returned to Brazil (and Belo Horizonte) with the 1979 amnesty (Machado 2003).


experimentation, because they bring together groups with a wide array of resources.
In the more successful cases presented here, leaders in the river basin started small,
with concrete projects that helped build social capital – an ability among members to
pool and use their own resources through networks, which resulted in trust among
members and increased confidence in the capacity to carry out more ambitious
projects. When those broader projects allowed the organization to gain public
visibility and credibility, they began to transform their social capital into political
capital. If the former is associated with an ability to carry out projects with their own
resources, the latter has to do with being able to influence other organizations,

Figure 1: Building Political Authority

Social Capital
(mobilized
Party
resources, trust,
People, Organizations,Resources Support
internal
credibility)

External
Support

More Legal
ambitious Recog-
Concrete projects nition
practices

Political
capital
Visibility,
(Public Credibility)

POLITICAL
AUTHORITY

especially the state. The ability to transform social capital into political capital is
limited, however, by the political context in which it occurs. Where the new
organization gains formal recognition (legal status) and political support from more


powerful, higher level institutions, they can move much further in the quest to
influence policy. Such direct political support seems to be particularly rare
At the same time as they illustrate the development of political capital in and
by the basin committees, the examples presented in this paper suggest that
committees may play an important mobilizational role for the system and idea of
water resource management more generally. Instead of being essentially normative
bodies involved in planning and establishing priorities that would be enacted by other
components of the system, the committees have had to ensure that the prospective
enacters were present and willing to do their job. Much more than “decision-making
arenas”, those river basin committees that gain some political authority are activist
organizations that promote concrete visions of water management and seek to
transform the system within which they work.
This activist role seems quite far removed from the theoretical debates about
governance and participation in public decision-making in which political science
discussion of this kind of organ usually occurs. Yet without a view of deliberation that
links it to action, the idea of participatory and/or collaborative governance remains a
sterile conception. By focusing on their actions, and not just on their [in]ability to
perform the formal roles attributed to them in water management legislation, we
discover in the stories of these committees unexpected agency. An assessment of
whether their role in decision-making democratizes public policy or not seems
premature, in that the first step has to be making the policy public in the first place.
And this is fundamental for building what Lukes (2005[1974]) called the third
dimension of power: the power to define what issues should be considered political.

Bibliografia
Abers, Rebecca, 2000. Inventing Local Democracy, Boulder, Lynne Rienner.
Abers, Rebecca N. 2007, “Organizing for Governance: Building Collaboration in
Brazilian River Basins”. World Development. , v.35, p.1450 - 1463, 2007.
Abers, Rebecca N. and Dino, Karina Jorge. “Descentralização da Gestão da Água:
Por que os Comitês de Bacia Estão Sendo Criados?” Ambiente e Sociedade,
Vol. 8, No. 2, 2005.
Abers, Rebecca and Keck, Margaret. 2005. “Águas Turbulentas: Instituições e
Práticas Políticas na Reforma do Sistema de Gestão da Água no Brasil” IN:
MELO, M. A.; LUBAMBO, C. W. & COELHO, D. B. (orgs.) Desenho


Institucional e Participação Política: Experiências no Brasil Contemporâneo.
Rio de Janeiro, Editora Vozes.
Abers, Rebecca & Keck, Margaret E., 2008 (forthcoming), “Mobilizing the State: The
Erratic Partner in Brazil’s Participatory Water Policy”. Politics and Society.
Avritzer, Leonardo, 2002. Democracy and the Public Sphere in Latin America,
Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Avritzer, Leonardo, 2003. “O Orçamento Participativo e a Teoria Democrática: um
balanço crítico”, In: Avritzer, Leonardo; Navarro, Zander. Eds. A Inovação
Democrática no Brasil. São Paulo, Cortez, 14- 57
Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M.S, 1970. Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice. New
York, Oxford University Press.
Barth, Flávio, 1998. “Relatório sobre a sessão áspectos institucionais: legislação e
organização de sistemas de recursos e entidades participantes: natureza
juridical, composição, atribuições e formas de participação.” Paper presented
at Simpósio Internacional sobre Gestão de Recursos Hídricos – SinGReH.
Gramado, RS, 5-8 outubro.
Birner, Regina and and Wittmer, Heidi. 2003. “Using Social Capital to Create
Political Capital: How do Local Communities Gain Political Influence? A
Theoretical Approach and Empirical Evidence from Thailand.” In The
Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation. Cambridge:
Mass.: MIT Press.
Conca, Ken, 2005. Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global
Institution Building. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Dagnino, Evelina, 2002. “Sociedade Civil, Espaços públicos e a Construção
Democrática no Brasil: Limites e Possibilidades.” In Dagnino, Evelina, ed.
Sociedade Civil e Espaços Públicos no Brasil. São Paulo, Paz e Terra: 279-
302
Fidelman, Pedro, 2008. Comitês de Bacia sob o Olhar dos Seus Membros. (Projeto
Marca d´Água, Seguindo as Mudanças nas Gestãio das Bacias Hidrográficas
no Brasil, Caderno 2). Blumenau, IPA/FURB.
Formiga Johnsson, Rosa Maria and Lopes, Paula Duarte, eds., 2003, Retratos 3X4
das Bacias Pesquisadas. (Projeto Marca d’Água: seguindo as mudanças na
gestão das bacias hidrográficas do Brasil: Caderno 1), Brasília, FINATEC.


Jasper, Matheus and Paula Alkmin, 2007. “Para além da promessa de solução,”
Jornal Manuelzão. Ano 10, no. 40, Junho, p. 6.
Jornal Manuelzão, “Em 2010, vou navegar, pescar e nadar no Rio das Velhas”,
Supplemental Issue, November, 2004.
Lin, Nan, 2001a. Social Capital: A Theory of Social Structure and Action.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lin, Nan, 2001b. “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital.” In: Nan LIN, Karen
COOK, e Ronald S. BURT, orgs., Social Capital: Theory and Research. .
Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 3-30.
Lisboa, Apolo Heringer, 2008. “Meta 2010: Decisões necessárias e urgentes.”
Revista Manuelzão 45 (Maio), p. 4.
Lubell, Mark; Sabatier, Paul A.; Vedlitz, Arnold; Focht, Will; Trachtenberg, Zev;
Matlock, Marry, 2005. “Conclusions and Recommendations.” In: Swimming
Upstream: Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management. Edited by
Paul A. Sabatier, Will Focht, Mark Lubell, Zev Trachtenberg, Arnold Vedlitz,
and Marty Matlock. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 261-96.
Lukes, Steven, 2005[1974], Power: A Radical View (Second Edition). New York,
Palgrave MacMillan..
Machado, Otávio Luiz (org.), Depoimento de Apolo Heringer Lisboa a Otávio Luiz
Machado. Belo Horizonte/Recife por email: Projeto “A Corrente
Revolucionária de Minas Gerais.”
http://sejarealistapecaoimpossivel.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html,
accessed 31 may 2008.
McAdam, Doug, 1982. The Political Process and the Development of Black
Insurgency, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C.Wright, 1956. The Power Elite, New York, Oxford University Press.
Moe, Terry, 2005. “Power and Political Institutions.” Perspectives on Politics 3:2
(June): 215-33.
Neves, M. J. M. , 2004. “Efetividade dos Planos de Recursos Hídricos: Uma Análise
dos Casos no Brasil após 1990.”. Dissertação de Mestrado em Tecnologia
Ambiental e Recursos Hídricos, Departamento de Engenharia Civil e
Ambiental, Universidade de Brasília.
Putnam, Robert D., 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.
Princeton, Princeton University Press


Raustiala, Kal & Victor, David G., 2004, “The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic
Resources”, International Organization 58(Spring):277-309;
Santos Jr, Orlando Alves do; Queiroz Ribeiro, Luiz Cesar de; Azevedo, Sergio de,
2004. Governança Democrática e Poder Local: A experiência dos conselhos
municipais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, Revan.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, org., 2002 Democratizar a Democracia: os Caminhos
da Democracia Participativa. Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira. Pp. 39-82.
Sewell, William H., Jr., 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and
Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1-29.(July).
Sorensen, Eva & Torfing, Jacob, 2003. “Network Politics, Political Capital, and
Democracy”. International Journal of Public Administration, 26(6):609-634.
Tarrow, Sidney, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and
Politics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Tatagiba, Luciana, 2002. “Os Conselhos Gestores e a Democratização das
Políticas Públicas no Brasil”, In: Dagnino, Evelina, ed. Sociedade Civil e
Espaços Públicos no Brasil, São Paulo, Paz e Terra: 47-104.

Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (7)

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (20)

Ähnlich wie Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp

Ähnlich wie Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp (20)

Mehr von citacoesdosprojetos

Mehr von citacoesdosprojetos (20)

Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp