Environmental licensing in the social-economic sphere: public action instrumentation and implications for territorial development in the Amazon
Federal environmental licensing of mega projects in Brazil is the object of intense debates and regulatory reform. One of the main controversies regards the social-economic component of this instrument, in which impact management determinations often incorporates structuring of basic public services, therefore extrapolating the unilateral capacities of projects’ proponents. The Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, in the state of Pará, sets a new standard in terms of ambition and scope of the social-economic measures determined by the Brazilian environmental agency, IBAMA. From this scenario derives a peculiar and complex institutional coordination, in which IBAMA must activate public and private actors in varying levels of government and multiple sectors, such as education, health, law enforcement and sanitation. However, while environmental licensing is set to act upon precarious institutional and social development conditions in Amazonian territories, the literature that is mostly dedicated to infrastructure in this region does not yet concentrate on the role of this instrument. Conversely, research on the field of Environmental Impact Assessment tends to focus on licensing’s internal mechanisms and the quality of its technical procedures, lacking appreciation of conjectural changes that may be pushing the boundaries of it’s mandate. This work takes as premisse that it is possible and indeed necessary to approximate these two fields. It intends to demonstrate that, in the case of Belo Monte, licensing is an acute expression of public action instrumentation. Alongside the transformative actions of the main actors implicated in this process, the instrument reacts to exogenous and conjectural factors, molding itself beyond the mere management of impacts in the scale of projects and stepping into the issues of regional and territorial development in the Amazon.