Municipalização dos sistemas de licenciamento ambiental : estudos de caso na região do Vale do Rio Pardo - RS.

Abstract

The environment and its preservation/conservation are closely related to the survival of man as a species; however the dominating and exploitive character man has been full of has been relegating these issues to a second plan thus making nature helpless, a victim of humanity’s economical and industrial progress. This paper aims to evaluate the evolution and the importance of the process of implementing a municipalization of environmental licensing systems. The practice of environmental licensing has got important contributions to make in regard to defining new ways to regulate the exchanges among nature, individual and society, by involving the knowledge of the local reality and by the proximity of the controlling, education and inspection organs. The methodology used characterizes itself for being a qualitative approach based upon a bibliographical review and a field research carried out in some municipalities in the Rio Pardo Valley. Through a questionnaire applied in six municipalities it could be observed the difficulty for the formation and organization of the licensing sector for some of them, the lack of work guidelines and the absence of defined criteria to guide the processes of environmental licensing. On the other hand we have found organized and structured municipalities which have been promoting the licensing required for by the current legislation. To conclude it has been observed that there is a need for the municipalities to develop the local power in order to guarantee the environmental balance, seeing it is in the local level that problems are directly experienced and consequently more easily solved, due to the possibility of the community’s involvement in decision making and in the development of actions which aim both to prevent and to repair the environment.