Cibernética organizacional para o diagnóstico e o design da governança multinível dos recursos hídricos

Abstract

Despite numerous efforts to promote and implement more integrated approaches, problems of multi-level governance persist and compromise the sustainability of water resources in Brazil. This research presents an approach to guide the diagnosis and design of complex adaptive systems: a context-sensitive assessment of water governance at various levels. Combined with the specifications of a management process change, it fills the theoretical and methodological gaps observed between centralized and hierarchical forms of water resources management. It also addresses the urgent demand for recursively distributed structures, which use vertical and horizontal coordination as a primary alignment mechanism, suitable for dealing with the environmental complexity inherent to River Basin Organizations (RBOs). The approach aims to address challenges identified in the application of the formal institutional framework of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and in the practice of water governance, combining the positivist and interpretivist traditions for the diagnosis, design and analysis of the Viable System Model (VSM) in the Formoso River Basin. The focus is on the processes of implementing the formal institutional framework of IWRM at a regional and local scale and its incorporation into a multi-level water governance system in a broader environmental and social context. Strategies consistent with the formalized representation of the current situation of water governance were proposed based on an extensive literature review and exploratory study of the Formoso River Basin (BHRF). The emerged conceptual and methodological framework served to the identification of a series of factors considered relevant for understanding the performance of environmental governance and RBOs. The framework offers a cybernetic approach to analyzing the complex and multifaceted phenomenon through the horizontal and vertical coordination of multi-level governance. The results include the identification of multiple paths that can lead to an improvement or a decline in the viability of RBOs.