A natureza dos planos municipais de saneamento é influenciada pelas instituições elaboradoras?: um estudo comparativo em três municípios de Minas Gerais

Abstract

The new Water and Sanitation Policy in Brazil has dictated the new national guidelines for this sector, establishing the responsibility of the municipality in preparing plans for municipal sanitation, what became pre-requisite for federal budget transfers and for signing newconcession contracts and renewal of old ones. For this action, the municipality can make these plans directly by its own institutional infrastructure, or delegate the task to other institutions through auctions and cooperation agreements with other public or private institutions. In this context where the demand for skilled professionals to develop plans grows, probably many institutions will offer their services to municipalities. This way, it is expected that plans made by different institutions would be characterized differently about their motivation, theirconstruction process and suitability for the Water and Sanitation Policy. By the comparison of case studies based on different institutions that make plans, the study aimed to evaluate the process of developing municipal water and sanitation plans in the context of the brazilian reality. In this research, three towns were studied at Minas Gerais State, Viçosa, Pará de Minas and Brumadinho, with the objective of illustrating the plans drawing up by a educational institute, by a municipality and other with the direct action of the State Sanitation Company. Qualitative techniques such as interviews, focal groups and documentary research were used for data collection in this study and coding, categorization and thematic analysiswere used for data interpretation. The results indicated that the different characteristics of the plans developer institutions seem to influence the nature and content of documents that composes or underlie the plans. The differences in the characteristics and motivations of this development reflected mainly in the territorial planning scope, social participation andempowerment. The drawing up of the first plan of Brumadinho town, which was motivated by the renewal and signing of a new concession contract, followed strictly the sanitation company model, has no participatory planning character, and was performed only in the areasof Company interest, although its review covers the entire county. The process of the plan developed in Viçosa considered the social contribution of the whole municipality and actions concerned with empowerment of the population. Although all of districts in Pará de Minaswere considered, in this case, the interest of the Sanitation Company was inclusing these sites. In addition, other important conclusions and inferences emerged from the study such as the lack of government action to manage and ensure the adoption of this new instrument createdby the new policy and the need to better train managers who will be permanently in the municipalities.