Políticas públicas de saneamento básico e investimentos setoriais na Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro: uma análise sob a perspectiva da justiça socioambiental

Abstract

Due to the numerous externalities associated with basic sanitation services – in particular, with the components of water supply and sanitation – the public policies developed in this area have high redistributive power, constituting an important instrument for fighting against socio-environmental inequalities. Despite that fact, and in spite of the massive sectoral investments received in the last decades, the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area is characterized, until today, with marked disparities in the levels of water supply and sanitation coverage, especially with regard to the latter. The purpose of the present work is to analyze the water supply and sanitation public policies developed in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area, from the perspective of the notion of socio-environmental justice, with focus on its redistributive bias, investigating, through concrete data, the existing inequalities between the Municipalities that compose such urban agglomerate in what concerns to the allocation of the respective structures and sectoral investments. The results obtained from the research carried out suggest that the decisions adopted within the water supply and sanitation public policies developed in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area have contributed to the perpetuation of a specific pattern of service deficit, which is related to the location of the domicile in the metropolitan context, causing thus the aggravation of the socio-environmental inequalities existing between the metropolitan Municipalities.