Constructing water governability in Ceará: advances and challenges after four decades of reforms

Abstract

The management of water resources in the Brazilian state of Ceará has been widely praised for its governance, commonly regarded as remarkably participatory and integrated. However, this model, whose essential contours were designed between 1987 and 1993, also included a governability project. The democratization of governance was conceived as a tool to better know about, control, and direct the uses of water by state agencies, at different scales. After three decades of implementation, what has this project of governability through democratic means achieved? In this paper, we argue that governance arrangements were, on the one hand, fundamental to furthering water governability at the “meso” level of watersheds; but, on the other hand, that they were much less conducive to strengthening governability at the more “micro”, local level. We attribute these ambivalent effects to two mechanisms. First, the implementation of the model raised many issues related to the institutional organization of watersheds, which consequently monopolized stakeholders’ attention, to the detriment of the challenges that emerged at the local level. Second, governance arrangements eventually confined municipalities to a subordinate role, even though local governments remain indispensable actors to advance local governability. Thus, we foreground two unexpected effects of governance on governability: the monopolization of attention and the marginalization of an influential actor. Insofar as these effects may well end up destabilizing the governance architecture itself, we conceptualize them as ‘negative’ policy feedback, which the paper thus contributes to identify. In conclusion, we argue that only more inclusive and deliberative forms of governance at the local level may strenghten the local governability of water resources, thereby opening a new chapter for the “Ceará model”.