Regional public policy for risk management: the implementation process in the greater ABC region, São Paulo city metropolitan region

Abstracts

The impact of disasters associated with extreme rainfall episodes in Santa Catarina (2008) and Rio de Janeiro (2010 and 2011) led to important legal and institutional progress in incorporating the theme of disaster risk management (GRD) to the government agenda: the Law 12608/2012 and a set of actions at the federal level, that outlined major qualitative leap in managing disaster risks in the country. Thus, this article discusses experiences in Brazilian territory which played an important role in building a national landmark public policy of risk management, highlighting the work in the Greater ABC (SP) region, involving seven cities: Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Maua, Ribeirão Pires and Rio Grande da Serra, and are implemented through a regional joint that exception to the rule within the Brazilian federation, seeking to act in a cooperative manner in the management of risks.

Public police; Risk management; Regional cooperation; Region of Grande ABC

O impacto dos desastres associados a episódios pluviométricos extremos ocorridos em Santa Catarina (2008) e Rio de Janeiro (2010 e 2011) motivou importantes avanços legais e institucionais na incorporação da temática de gestão de riscos de desastres (GRD) à agenda governamental: a Lei 12608/2012 e um conjunto de ações em nível federal, que configuraram importante salto qualitativo na gestão de riscos de desastres no país. Nesse sentido, esse artigo aborda experiências no território brasileiro que exerceram papel importante na construção de um marco nacional da política pública de gestão de riscos, destacando os trabalhos na região do Grande ABC (SP), envolvendo sete municípios: Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Mauá, Ribeirão Pires e Rio Grande da Serra, e que são realizados por meio de uma articulação regional que foge à regra no Brasil, buscando atuar de forma cooperada na gestão de riscos.

Políticas públicas; Gestão de risco; Cooperação regional; Região do Grande ABC

Regional public policy for risk management: the implementation process in the greater ABC region, São Paulo city metropolitan region ^*

Fernando Rocha Nogueira^I; Vanessa Elias de Oliveira^II; Katia Canil^III

^IPh.D. in Geosciences and Environment, and lecturer at the Center for Engineering, Modeling and Applied Social Sciences (Centro de Engenharia, Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas – CECS) and of the Territorial Planning and Management Post-Graduation Program of the ABC Federal University – UFABC. [e-mail]

^IIPh.D. in Political Sciences, and lecturer of Political Sciences of the Public Policies Bachelor Program and of the Territorial Planning and Management Post-Graduation Program of the ABC Federal University – UFABC. [e-mail]

^IIIPh.D. in Physical Geography, and lecturer of the Territorial Planning Bachelor Program and of the Environmental Science and Technology Post-Graduation Program of the ABC Federal University – UFABC. [e-mail]

ABSTRACT

The impact of disasters associated with extreme rainfall episodes in Santa Catarina (2008) and Rio de Janeiro (2010 and 2011) led to important legal and institutional progress in incorporating the theme of disaster risk management (GRD) to the government agenda: the Law 12608/2012 and a set of actions at the federal level, that outlined a major qualitative leap in managing disaster risks in the country. Thus, this article discusses experiences in the Brazilian territory which played an important role in building a national landmark of risk management public policy, highlighting the work in the Greater ABC (SP) region, involving seven cities: Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Maua, Ribeirão Pires and Rio Grande da Serra, and are implemented through a regional joint effort that is an exception to the rule within the Brazilian federation, seeking to act in a cooperative manner in risk management.

Keyword: public policies; risk management; regional cooperation; Greater ABC region

RESUMEN

El impacto de los desastres asociados a episodios extremos de precipitación en Santa Catarina (2008) y Río de Janeiro (2010/2011) motivo importantes avances legales y institucionales en la incorporación de la temática de la gestión del riesgo (GRD) para la agenda del gobierno: Ley 12608/2012 y una serie de acciones a nivel federal constituyó un importante salto en la gestión de riesgos de desastres. En ese sentido, describimos las experiencias en territorio brasileño que ejercieron un papel importante en la construcción de una política pública nacional de la gestión de riesgos, destacando el trabajo en la región del Gran ABC (SP): Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Mauá, Ribeirão Pires y Rio Grande da Serra, y se implementan por medio de una articulación regional que es una excepción a la regla en la federación brasileña, buscando actuar de manera conjunta en la gestión de riesgos.

Palabra clave: políticas públicas; gestión del riesgo; cooperación regional; Región del Gran ABC

Introduction

The issue of environmental disasters and associated risks has achieved increasing relevance in the last thirty years, both in the academic research field and in public policies. Despite the predominant focus on response to hazards, an evolution has taken place in the last decade of the 20^th century towards a more integrated approach among groups that consider knowledge of the risks and prospective and corrective actions for risk reduction and preparation to handle hazards, which is named by Grande (2011) as “governança preventiva” (preventive governance) and by Medd & Simon (2005) as “governance of preparedness”. Such actions were taken as a response to increasing human loss and, more significantly, to economic impacts related to world disasters (Guha-Sapir et al., 2013). Several institutional initiatives to cope with such perception are available in the site The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reductionⁱ. The disaster issue has also been greatly emphasized in recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Changes, which stress the relationship between global climatic change and potential increase of the associated disasters (Baker, 2012; IPCC, 2014). From the beginning of this decade, the management of disaster risks and the increase of the society resilience due to the impacts of environmental disasters have been treated as indispensable elements to the economic and social development of countries and cities (Toro & Pedroso, 2013; World Bank, 2013).

In Brazil, a markedly fragile country when it comes to a culture of precaution and prevention of disasters and institutional presence in this field (Nogueira, 2008; Alheiros, 2011, Toro & Pedroso, op. cit.), the crises have been dealt with, as a general action pattern, by “urgency policies”, which focus on the speed to demonstrate that something is being done, without taking into account reflection and planning ahead (Medd & Marvin 2005, p. 44).

The impact of disasters associated with extreme rainfall episodes that occurred in the last ten years, mainly in Santa Catarina State in 2008 and Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and 2011, did not retrieve the long history of marking disasters in Brazil, but promoted important legal and institutional advances that could result in the late, but very welcome, incorporation of the issue of disaster risk management (GRD) to urban planning and public management agendas: Law 12608/2012 and federal actions that represent an important qualitative leap in disaster risk management in Brazil. Two major initiatives were taken, considering that the country definitively started to establish a governmental agenda to deal with the issue. The first one was Programa 2040 do Plano Plurianual 2012-2015 (Program 2040 of 2012-2015 Multiannual Plan – Brasil, 2012a), which deals with Gestão de Riscos e Resposta a Desastres (Risk Management and Response to Disasters) by presenting objectives and important endowments for the evolution and consolidation of this policy. One of the 65 Thematic Programs that composed such innovative piece of federal planning was the Programa 2040. For the first time, it introduced the disaster risk management in its most integrated conception (which includes the strategic axes of knowledge, of risk reduction, and of preparation to respond to disasters) to the Union Budget, under the responsibility of several Federal Government ministries. The creation and installation of the National Center for Monitoring and Alert of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) in Cachoeira Paulista (São Paulo State), under the Ministério de Ciência e Tecnologia (Ministry for Science and Technology) and the Centro Nacional de Gerenciamento de Riscos e Desastres (National Center for Risk and Disaster Management – CENAD), and the Ministério de Integração Nacional (Ministry for National Integration), were important advances in this sense.

Secondly, Federal Law 12608/2012 (Brasil, 2012b) institutes the National Policy for Civil Protection and Defense – PNPDEC, provides for the National System for Civil Protection and Defense – SINPDEC and for the National Council for Civil Protection and Defense – CONPDEC. It authorizes the creation of information systems for disaster monitoring and other measures, shows ways to incorporate the physical environment and its menaces in urban and territorial planning and disaster prevention, especially with the mandatory mapping of disaster risk areas and preparation of geotechnical charts by the municipalities (Law 12608/12, Article 3, Paragraph II, Items I and V).

If we think in terms of a “cycle of public policies”, there is a long way between the formulation of a policy and its implementation. Regarding the disaster risk management policy, the municipalities are the loci where the implementation must take place, that is, they are the actual sites where such policies must materialize in an effective way, once the majority of the disasters that take place in the Brazilian territory reflect locally or regionally. However, municipalities are in fact the most fragile federal entities, both in terms of economic and technical-administrative capacity, posing a major challenge to the realization of the policy and its consolidation at a local level.

In addition to the institutional fragility of great part of the municipalities, especially the smaller ones (which, by the way, is the case of the majority of the Brazilian municipalities), there is the difficulty imposed by the federation to generate ways of intergovernmental cooperation. Thus, even if, on one hand, it seems to exist a “cooperative federalism”, with the sharing of skills among federal entities in a series of public policies, on the other hand, there exists a centrifugal trend from the Brazilian federation, with results from the ample political, administrative and fiscal autonomy of states and municipalities (Silva, 2011) and places strong barriers to cooperation. These diverging trends, as pointed out by Abrucio, Sano and Sydow (2010), makes the management of public policies that extrapolate municipal territorial limits very difficult, demanding the cooperation among municipalities of the same region or within the limits of hydrographic basins, such as the case of disaster risk management policies.

Therefore, in order to consolidate these advances at a local level, it is indispensable that they be made available to decision makers and technicians involved in the management of municipalities and that GRD be understood as a sustainability component of urban, economic and social development.

In the last decade of the 20^th century, some local experiences played an important role in the construction of a national risk management milestone. In the last years, a regional articulation has been developing in the Greater ABC region, which is an exception to the rule in the Brazilian federation. With its seven municipalities (Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Mauá, Ribeirão Pires, and Rio Grande da Serra), the Greater ABC seeks to respond to risk management in a cooperative way.

In this paper, these questions will be discussed, from the difficulties imposed by the Brazilian federalism to the regional management of public policies. From this contextualization, the (scarce) regional experiences regarding risk management in Brazil will be reviewed, and then a case study, resulting from this research, will be presented. Finally, we will discuss possible advances in these policies, considering, on one hand, the difficulties placed by the Brazilian federal institutional framework and, on the other hand, the advances and failures of some national experiences and innovations generated by the regional cooperation in ABC. We will demonstrate that the institutional difficulties are not irrelevant, but can be overcome by intergovernmental cooperation mechanisms. These, even if conjunctural, can become models and achieve an institutionality in order to consolidate them, coexisting with the municipal autonomy advocated in the Brazilian Constitution.

The Brazilian federalism, the regional issue and the risk management public policy

The discussion on the contours of the federation in the re-democratization process was highly influenced by the centralizing heritage of the authoritarian period in Brazil. The strong link between authoritarianism and power centralization in the hands of the federal government drove the debate on democratization to the opposite end, associating it with decentralization. In this context, the ample municipal autonomy defended by the municipalist movement was seen as the only way to the democratization of the management of public policies, generating a negative reaction to the negotiations concerning the metropolitan issue and the urban reform in the constitutional process. As pointed out by Celina Souza (2007),

“os constituintes de 1988 [...] decidiram deixar a governança metropolitana em um vazio político, institucional e administrativo, restringindo a reforma urbana à criação de mecanismos participativos na esfera local” (Souza, 2007, p.238, apud Frey, 2012).

“the constituents of 1988 [...] decided to leave the metropolitan governance in a political, institutional and administrative vacuum, restricting urban reform to the creation of participatory mechanisms at a local level” (Souza, 2007, p.238, apud Frey, 2012).

And to this day “the political disinterest in public management of the metropolitan areas” (Ribeiro, 2004, p. 22) persists, the metropolitan issue being excluded from the state reforms implemented in the last decades. The “statualization of the metropolitan issue” in the constitutional process has not helped in the confrontation of regional and metropolitan issues.

Therefore, the debate on metropolitan regions has not advanced, creating the present uncertainty scenario regarding the definition of a metropolitan region and, further, of how these must be managed. This lack of a real institutionality reached STF, which had to define, in the case of sanitation, which federal entity is responsible for sanitation services – the state, the municipality, or the “metropolitan entity”, even if the latter does not institutionally exist. No wonder the diagnosis recently presented by IPEA asserted:

“(...) não há, rigorosamente falando, gestão metropolitana no país, ao menos não no sentido de que um determinado desenho institucional responda aos anseios, estratégias e objetivos de uma política de ordenamento territorial e/ou à gestão integrada de desafios compartilhados” (Costa, 2013, p.323).

(...) rigorously speaking, there is no metropolitan management in Brazil, at least not in the sense that a certain institutional design responds to wishes, strategies and objectives of a territorial ordering policy and/or to the integrated management of shared challenges” (Costa, 2013, p.323).

In turn, decentralization alone has not brought the responses necessary to face local and regional difficulties. As listed by Melo (1996), the main problems faced by the decentralization processes in Latin America are: low-qualified local bureaucracy, especially when compared to central ones; transference of public revenues without the required municipal counterpart; indefinition of the responsibilities of each governmental level, especially when there is an ample overlapping of competence predicted in the Constitution, as in Brazil; porosity of the municipal governments to local elites and proliferation of municipalities, among others (Melo, 1996: 14-15). All these difficulties can be detected in the Brazilian decentralization process, in which the proliferation of municipalities has not been accompanied by their capacity as entities able to manage the majority of public policies under their responsibility, in particular in an autonomous and isolated way.

As a result of this federation model, a scenario of difficulties exists to cope with regional demands, being the articulation of interests among autonomous federal entities one of the main difficulties, in a context in which the incentives to inter-municipal cooperation are scarce. Celso Daniel, a key-actor for the institution of the Greater ABC Consortium, called it “autarchic municipalism” (Daniel, 2001).

If it is a fact that all public policies that encompass the regional dimension share this same integration problem, the disaster risk management policy presents some peculiarities that make the intergovernmental cooperation even more difficult and challenging.

Initially, risk policy deals with something uncertain, related to the future, hardly yielding political gains in the short term. Meanwhile, political costs related to the non-pursuit of such policy can only manifest when the risks become a crisis or even a catastrophe.

“...el riesgo es un concepto extraño, representa algo irreal, en tanto que está siempre relacionado con azar, con posibilidad, con algo que aún no ha sucedido. Es una abstracción de un proceso de transformación que denota simultáneamente posibilidad y realidad. Es algo imaginario y escurridizo que parece solo existir en el futuro y que refleja un estado indeseable de realidad, pero su existencia compleja es consustancial al hombre.” (Cardona, 2007, p.1)

“... risk is a strange concept, it represents something unreal, so much so that it is always related to bad luck, to chance, to something that has not happened yet. It is an abstraction of a transformation process that denotes possibility and reality simultaneously. It is something imaginary and elusive that seems to exist only in the future and reflects an undesirable state of reality; however, its complex existence is inherent to man.” (Cardona, 2007, p.1)

Therefore, it is difficult to mobilize both the institutional political system and the society in favor of an effective risk reduction policy. Frequently, the crisis or the catastrophe that the risk reduction policy intends to avoid is the one that opens a window of opportunity to trigger it. The risk policy dilemmas are revealed by the usual political-administrative activism that follows major landslide and flooding phenomena and by the quick decline of such political and media mobilization, as soon as the waters recede. This is largely attested because the most affected sectors – frequently of scarce economic and political resources and in extreme vulnerability conditions – cannot sustain the political pressure upon political and administrative agents. Thus, the role played by the society and the affected population is of fundamental importance to the success of a disaster risk management policy.

Therefore, risk policy shares with other environmental policies – such as those related to climatic changes, for example – the dilemmas of uncertainty and unpredictability when it is formulated, revealing the interdependencies between the different worlds only in case of a crisis (Medd & Marvin, 2005, p.44).

Another aspect to be taken into account, especially in the case of Brazilian federalism, strongly anchored in public policies decentralization for local autonomous entities, is the additional difficulty of articulation, not only inter-municipal, but also inter-sectorial. How is it possible to expand this task to public management integrally and in especial to sectors of such management linked to planning, habitation and occupation control, to public works and services, to social care and to health? These are inter-related areas that must be treated concomitantly with risk management. However, nowadays they are thought and formulated in sectors, in an isolated or hardly integrated manner.

The complexity of these inter-relationships requires, in the academic and research fields, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches, at the same time that the dialog between science, society and politics must be intensified.

In Brazil, the successful experiences of regional cooperation are still rare, especially in the area of disaster risk management, in which we are only starting to realize that “los costes políticos de la omisión son mucho más elevados que los costes políticos de la sobrerreacción” (the political costs of omission are much higher than the costs of political overreaction – Beck, 2011, p. 25), and to leave the states of denial and apathy to think about transformation strategies with the recent federal and, locally, statal and local initiatives. Even so, the scientific and inter-disciplinary knowledge on the peculiarities of this public policy is still little in Brazil. In this sense, this paper is a contribution to the debate.

Regional risk management experiences in Brazil

Nogueira et al (2005, p.6), during a nationwide diagnosis of landslide risk management, in order to help planning the supporting actions for the newly created Ministry for the Cities for municipalities in risk situations, were able to identify a few examples of “supra-municipal integration” of the risk management activities. Among them, the sole experience known of regional articulation related to disaster risk management in Brazil with measurable results occurred in the Recife Metropolitan Region (RMR)ⁱⁱ.

Around the year 2000, after a sequence of disasters associated with landsliding in RMR hills, which in the 1990’s caused ca. 150 casualties and large homelessness (Bandeira, 2003, p.12), the local municipal governments seek help from the Pernambuco State Government and the Legislative Assembly. The issue Hills and Slopes has been included, from 1998, in the agenda of the Metropolitan Chamber for Environment and Sanitation, instance of technical support of the Metropolitan Region Development Council – CONDERM, linked to the Statal Secretary for Planning. From 2001 to 2004, as an initiative of the municipal governments linked to the Pernambuco Municipalist Association (AMUPE) and to the Fund for Municipal Development (FIDEM), unified amendments were established to be presented by the Pernambuco State federal deputies, in order to obtain resources from the Federal Budget (OGU) to protect RMR hills and slopes (Pernambuco, 2004). This publication reports:

“Das sucessivas reuniões realizadas pela Câmara, que contaram com a presença de técnicos das Prefeituras Municipais, Órgãos Públicos Estaduais e Federais, e representantes de entidades da sociedade civil mais diretamente envolvidos com a questão – resultaram duas recomendações básicas:

(1) buscar uma solução articulada e progressiva para se contrapor à prática das ações emergenciais e pontuais através de uma mobilização sistemática integrada com os órgãos públicos e os moradores numa visão preventiva e de estruturação desses espaços que tomou o nome de Movimento Viva o Morro e posteriormente de Programa Viva o Morro; e

(2) realizar estudos sobre o estado d’arte da ocupação de morros, que refletisse o conhecimento disponível na região e em outras áreas com problemas semelhantes, a ser aplicado no planejamento estratégico da RMR, bem como servir de subsídios para as Comissões Estadual e Municipais de Defesa Civil” (Pernambuco, 2004, p. 22).

“From successive meetings promoted by the Chamber and attended by technicians from Municipal governments, Statal and Federal Public Agencies and representatives from the civil societies more directly involved with the issue – two basic recommendations resulted:

(1) to search for an articulated and progressive solution as a counterpart for the practice of emergency and localized actions, by means of an integrated systematic mobilization with public agencies and residents in a preventive and structuring view of such spaces, which was named Movimento Viva o Morro (Viva o Morro Movement) and later Programa Viva o Morro (Viva o Morro Program); and

(2) to carry out studies on the state-of-the-art of hill slope occupation, reflecting the available knowledge in the region and in other areas with similar problems, to be applied in the RMR strategic planning, as well as serve as support for the Statal and Municipal Civil Defense Commissions” (Pernambuco, 2004, p. 22).

The Viva o Morro Program established, since its creation, an important technical exchange with the Pernambuco Federal University (Alheiros et al., 2002; Alheiros, 2011). During the first period of the Viva o Morro Program, an important publication named Manual de Ocupação dos Morros da Região Metropolitana do Recife (Manual of Slope Occupation in the Recife Metropolitan Region; Alheiros, 2002) was produced in the reduced bibliographic universe of disaster risk management in Brazil.

With the creation of the Ministry for the Cities in 2003, the Ação de Apoio a Programas Municipais de Redução e Erradicação de Riscos (Action to Support Municipal Programs for Risk Reduction and Elimination) was implemented within the Programa Urbanização, Regularização e Integração de Assentamentos Precários (Program for the Urbanization, Regularization and Integration of Precarious Settlements) of the Secretaria Nacional de Programas Urbanos (National Secretariat for Urban Programs).

The aim of this action, in articulation with the policies of urban development and soil use and occupation, was the promotion of a series of structural and non-structural measures to reduce landslide risks in slopes of urban areas (Brasil, 2010). Since then, according to information made available in 2010 by the economist Sonia Gomes de Matos Medeiros, manager of the Viva o Morro Program, the Condepe/FIDEMⁱⁱⁱ Agency became a support for the Program, promoting the following actions in the RMR municipalities (Medeiros, 2010):

– exchange of experiences between municipalities on forms of organization and practices of civil defense and risk reduction actions;

– constitution of a risk management forum, to treat issues of common interest related to civil defense and risk reduction actions;

– articulation to make investments available for risk reduction in slopes and flooded areas and actions of institutional and technical strengthening of the Civil Defense Municipal Coordination Agencies – RMR COMDEC.

In this sense, CONDEPE/FIDEM had, together with the Ministry for the Cities, the task of managing the Municipal Plans of Risk Reduction, which were in preparation in nine RMR municipalities, with the following objectives: (1) monitoring and providing technical support to the Municipal government teams responsible for the preparation of the Municipal Plans for Risk Reduction – PMRR, and (2) sharing experiences, conforming methodologies and parameters, searching for technical quality and making Municipal Plans for Risk Reduction compatible, aiming at the integration of PMRR to a Metropolitan Plan for Risk Reduction.

A similar attempt for a regional risk management started in Minas Gerais State in 2010, as an initiative of the Secretariat for Urban and Regional Development (SEDRU), to organize risk management in the Belo Horizonte and Vale do Aço metropolitan regions (Souza et al., 2011). However, the disarticulation of the involved leaders led to failure – which demonstrates the difficulty in implementing public policies of regionalized character.

Implementation of a regionalized risk management policy: the case of Greater ABC

The Greater ABC region, constituted by seven municipalities (Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, São Caetano do Sul, Diadema, Mauá, Ribeirão Pires, and Rio Grande da Serra), located in the southern portion of São Paulo Metropolitan Region (Figure 1), has overcome the difficulties concerning cooperation, imposed by the federalism in Brazil. Thanks to a series of regional characteristics, it consolidated a successful experience of inter-municipal cooperation, by means of the Greater ABC Inter-Municipal Consortium.

Constituted as a private association under civil law at the end of 1990, it was transformed in a Public Consortium in the beginning of 2010, “becoming part of the indirect administration of the syndicated municipalities, entitle to plan and execute public policy actions regionally”^iv The Consortium has been acting, either with more or less intensity and success, in planning and management of a series of regionalized public policies that aim at economic development, regional mobility and recently at disaster risk management, whose objectives extend beyond the territorial limits of a single municipality.

Due to the local importance of the Greater ABC Inter-Municipal Consortium, the ABC Federal University has established a special relationship with it in order to deal with different matters, and in the last two years, partnerships to address disaster risks.

During 2012, the ABC Federal University and the Consortium developed an Extension Program – PROEXT named “Geological Risk Management in Urban Environment: Landsliding and Correlated Processes”, involving graduation and post-graduation students and public agents of the seven municipalities of the ABC region (Nogueira et al., 2013). In the same year, the Consortium constituted a Civil Defense Working Group, who has contributed to the improvement of the structures of this agency in the municipalities, by means of training activities for municipal technicians, investments in the local infra-structure of Civil Defenses, and improving the regional disaster risk diagnosis. Still in 2012, the Consortium established a partnership with the Institute for Technological Research of São Paulo State – IPT to elaborate Municipal Plans for Risk Reduction (PMRRs) for Ribeirão Pires, Rio Grande da Serra and Santo André municipalities, which were devoid of such instrument of planning and action. São Bernardo do Campo, Diadema and Mauá had already elaborated their PMRR by attracting resources from the Ministry for the Cities. The objective of such agreement was to establish a standard methodology and making the information available for the whole region, in order to build a Regional Plan of Risk Reduction, including preventive and corrective actions. Besides, a diagnosis was carried out and mitigation measures were indicated for the flooding areas of São Caetano do Sul. Such studies were concluded by the end of 2013.

As a follow-up to the risk management actions, the Technical Workshop “Challenges of Urban Risk Management in Greater ABC”, promoted by the Inter-Municipal Consortium with the support from UFABC, took place in May 2013. The objective of the Workshop was to discuss and define an agenda of regional actions aiming at an integrated risk management – not limited to handling disasters, which demanded the integration of different public policies other than Civil Defense. As a result of the Workshop, a Thematic Group named “Regional Management of Urban Risks” was created. In the following months the group promoted monthly meetings to strengthen the regional articulation in the definition of methodologies and standard procedures (later validated by IPT) to obtain resources from the São Paulo State Government to remove dwellings in high-risk situations, according to risk mapping. This on-going action involved the preventive removal of 630 families under risk in six municipalities, transference of temporary rent assistance up to 36 months, and even a permanent housing assistance for the removed families and financial support from the State for the building of housing units, in order to help those families who have not been included in existing projects.

In November 2013, the Regional Workshop for the Planning of Joint Contingency Actions was organized for the summer of 2013-2014 and a seminar of training activities on Law 12608/2012 and its consequences in municipal management.

Still in the context of regional risk management policy, the Inter-Municipal Conference on Civil Defense took place on March 14^th and 15^th, 2014. All seven municipalities took part in the conference, which was a preparatory meeting to establish principles and guidelines to be discussed in the Statal Conference on Civil Defense, which took place in April 12^th and 13^th, 2014. The objective of the First Statal Conference on Protection and Civil Defense was to promote the participation, social control and integration of public policies related to Civil Defense, in view of new paradigms regarding Protection and Civil Defense. Members of the segments civil society, professional and public policies councils, scientific community, and Public Power, besides invited people and observers, participated in the conference. At the end, principles and guidelines were voted to compose the São Paulo State official document, as well as the delegates representative of the four segments to participate at II National Conference on Protection and Civil Defense.

Finally, in partnership with the Ministry for the Cities, signed in 2014, UFABC will develop a project for the preparation of Geotechnical Charts of Suitability for Urbanization for two ABC municipalities (São Bernardo do Campo and Rio Grande da Serra), as another important part of the building of regional public policies for disaster risk management.

The Thematic Group on Regional Management of Urban Risks, which is part the Greater ABC Inter-Municipal Consortium, listed the following activities to be developed from 2014 on:

1 – ask UFABC for help in reviewing the Municipal Plans for Risk Reduction;

2 – consolidate knowledge on risk of regional nature – joint action in municipal risk areas;

3 – build the hierarchy of sub-basins and micro-basins and take to the municipalities the proposal to adopt it as a hierarchy criterion for the interventions;

4 – guide the municipalities to conform to the provisions of Law 12608/2012;

5 – make the information concerning risk areas accessible to the public;

6 – prepare qualification plans for the sub-basin and present them to the Statal Government;

7 – promote a better structure and professional training of Civil Defense municipal teams, with the objective of reducing differences among them;

8 – Consortium must prepare a Regional Platform of Risk Management;

9 – Consortium must create systems to integrate data of any type, including cartographic data, giving ample and unrestricted access to municipal teams;

10 – Consortium must work in order to make existing data and materials on the matter, kept in municipal, statal and federal institutions and agencies, available to interested people;

11 – propose studies for the assessment of losses and damages arising from disasters in the ABC region.

Vargas (2010) considers as basic action lines for risk management in municipalities: (i) knowledge of the risks, their causes and consequences, by means of the analysis and monitoring of their components and respective cartographic representation; (ii) the need to reduce risk in its present conditions (mitigation) and possible future conditions (prevention); (iii) protection in view of the financial component of the unmitigated or immitigable risk; (iv) preparation to respond to emergencies and disasters, as well as to recovery, searching for the effectiveness of such actions in known risk conditions; (v) response action and recovery in face of the occurrence of emergencies or disasters, taking effective advantage of the preparation for such purpose; and (vi) the organization at the institutional and communitarian level to make the previous action lines available. The actions that have been developed with the involvement of the Thematic Group adopt this conceptual landmark and start to configure the building of an effectively regional policy for disaster risk management. This will be a long process, with the definition of short-, medium- and long-term actions, which will need technical and political support from the public managers, involvement of the communities and financial resources. The first step was given and will be accompanied by those interested and beneficiaries of such actions.

Thus, it can be said that, notwithstanding the difficulty imposed by our model of federalism for inter-municipal cooperation, as exposed here, the Greater ABC experience sheds light to the possibility of an articulated action among municipalities that, although autonomous, can act jointly in favor of supra-municipal, regional interests.

The possible advances in regional risk management

Law 12608/2012, which defines the attributions of the municipalities within the National System for Civil Protection and Defense and establishes very challenging tasks for those included in the National Register for municipalities with areas susceptible to the occurrence of large-impact landslides, sudden flooding or correlated geological or hydrological processes, brought an important contribution, so that the municipalities can effectively take actions when managing risks and responses to disasters. No doubt, the search for experiences and practices developed in other countries regarding the supra-municipal organization to face risks and disasters is a task for municipal technicians and teaching, research and extension institutions involved in this process – among them UFABC. Such effort is justified by the ascertainment that the regional or metropolitan organization of the risk management is a structure to be encouraged in Brazil at least for three reasons:

1. It can promote the advance of the less-structured municipalities from the articulation with the more qualified and equipped ones, making possible the implementation of new legislation and goals recently defined by the Union for disaster risk management;

2. It can promote the optimization of material, technical, human and logistic resources available, with no need that all municipalities acquire or incorporate them to the local structure; and

3. Makes monitoring and treatment of physical processes possible at a regional scale or in the hydrographic basin where they take place.

Besides, the organization and articulation process promoted by the Consortium, with support of mayors and involvement of municipal technical team can constitute a model of Brazilian reference, which will serve as an example for other metropolitan regions that face similar problems. It is worth remembering that one of the main advantages pointed out by the federalism theorists is indeed the possibility that it generates new experiences and public policy models, being the reason why federations are perceived as “laboratories for public policies” (Souza, 2005; Anderson, 2009).

In this sense, besides serving as a model, the case of the Greater ABC seems to be a successful example of inter-municipal cooperation, in which all involved municipalities are winners: the larger and more structured both institutionally and financially, because they solve the problems that affect them and go beyond the limits of their municipalities with negative reflexes on them, and the smaller ones, because, acting jointly with the larger ones, their power for bargaining increase with respect to statal and/or federal governments, in the terms proposed by Oliveira (2008).

Notes

ⁱⁱ (see http://200.238.107.83/web/condepe-fidem/apresentacao12)

ⁱⁱⁱ Agency for planning, study, research and articulation, directed to the implementation of local and regional development policies in the Pernambuco State, linked to the Statal Secretariat for Planning and Management.

^iv (http://www.consorcioabc.sp.gov.br/ institucional/historico

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*

We would like to thank the valuable contribution of Prof. Klaus Frey, who enriched the theoretical analysis, especially in the discussion of metropolitan governance in risk management.

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http://www.unisdr.org)

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Feb 2015
• Date of issue
  Dec 2014

History

• Accepted
  14 Aug 2014
• Received
  29 May 2014