ID: 1798
Presenting Author: Pedro Henrique Wisniewski Koehler
Session: 519 - Perspectives on assessing cumulative impacts in the Global South
Status: pending
The study explores governance and institutional capacity for cumulative impact mitigation in Brazil, highlighting gaps in coordination and transaction costs that hinder implementation.
The effectiveness of environmental cumulative impact mitigation and management requires coordination across multiple scales, institutions, and stakeholders. Governance arrangements must foster cooperation and continuity of regional actions focused on significant impacts. These challenges are particularly acute in developing countries, as they lack a regulatory framework to specifically address cumulative impact assessment (CIA). This study aimed to analyze the governance conditions and institutional capacities necessary for cumulative impact mitigation in Brazil. The research explored perceptions, challenges and opportunities to enhance regional governance, using a CIA conducted along the country’s southeastern coast as a case study. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders and government agency officials involved with regional governance, such as watershed committees and coastal management forums. The results revealed implementation gaps associated with governance issues, in six categories: 1) Governance features; 2) Commitment to regional agreements; 3) Municipal engagement; 4) Institutional leadership; 5) Public agenda setting process; 6) Feasible governance. The identified issues reflect key aspects of multilevel and polycentric governance theory, especially the need for vertical and horizontal integration and interdependence of decision-making processes. The coordination dimension of governance arrangements proved to be a critical factor, given the high transaction costs that remain insufficiently addressed in current approaches to cumulative impact mitigation.
Oceanographer, environmental analyst at Brazil’s Institute of Environment, 15 years of experience in EIA of coastal projects and PhD candidate in Environmental Science.
Coauthor 1: Evandro Mateus Moretto