Political-administrative performance of environmental institutions in the 1990 s : the experience of Santa Catarina s Envonment Foundation - FATMA / Desempenho politico-administrativo das instituições ambientais da decada de 1990 : a experiencia da Fundação do Meio Ambiente de Santa Catarina - FATMA

Benilson Borinelli

During the 1990?s profound political, economic and cultural changes in Brazil and in the world caused significant alterations in the environmental policy agenda. In a wide and ambivalent movement, such transformations not only favored the spread of the environmental concern and its institutionalization, but also added a new order of restrictions for the effectiveness of environmental institutions. Thus, even if one cannot speak about less debility of state institutions, it is possible to affirm that, in the 90?s, there were important changes in their performance and in the expectations in relation to their roles, or, as I claim in this research, there was a reconfiguration of the debility of the public environmental institutions. In this work I analyze such a reconfiguration in the experience of the institution in charge of environmental policies in Santa Catarina, the Fundação do Meio Ambiente ? FATMA. In order to do that, I start from a concept of institutional performance that considers environmental institutions? debility as a political-administrative phenomenon, privileging the ascension of logics inherent to the capitalist and patrimonial State. I begin with the performance analysis of the environmental institution from Santa Catarina, highlighting the most relevant changes in its institutional capacity ? environmental public power centrality, financial and human resources, prioritized attributions and changes in the internal structure ? in order to, later, compare them with the modifications in the dominating political expectations in relation to its performance. Based on official documents, journals and interviews with technicians from environmental institutions, former FATMA directors, members of class entities, NGOs, big industries and politicians, I rebuild the trajectory of the environmental institution from Santa Catarina as well as, in a more general plan, of the environmental policy of the State of Santa Catarina in the 90?s, which comprehends a time span of, mainly, three governments (1991-2002). In the period analyzed, the impact of FATMA?s centrality in the environmental sector due to the expansion in the number of environmental institutions, the environmental institution?s dismantling, the ascension of the environmental licensing as a privileged attribution and the patrimonial politicization, synthesized in the ? at the time ? unprecedented environmental license-issuing agency (cartorialismo), describe better the nature of the changes that occurred in the way the environmental institution worked during the 90?s. This was strongly correlated with the redemocratization process, the emergence of new environmental control mechanisms and institutions, the crisis in the State in a neoliberal scenario and the specificity of the internalization of the environmental concern in the productive sector. Although considering debility and not exempt of tensions, the range of dominating expectations, when demanding the issuing of environmental licenses in wide scale, promoted FATMA to a superior level of importance in the environmental regulations. A more active position to protect the regional economic and political interests, reducing the threats of converting environmental costs into economic costs, added new elements to think about the crisis, the legitimacy and persistence of the agency during that period. The 1990?s depicted a new version of the negativity of environmental policy, whose origins were in the political embarrassment concerning environmental control in capitalist and authoritarian societies. The continuities, innovation and overlappings in the performance of environmental institutions in Santa Catarina restate the importance of initiatives of public and democratic control of environmental resources and risks, as well as of studies about the new forms taken by the State contradictions in environmental control

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