Paper de rebecca abers em congresso do abcp

6º Encontro da ABCP

29/07 a 01/08/2007, Unicamp, Campinas, SP

Área Temática: Estado e Políticas Públicas

Práticas Deliberativas:

A construção de poder decisório nos comitês de bacia hidrográfica

Rebecca Abers

Instituto de Ciência Política,

Universidade de Brasília

Margaret Keck

Political Science Department

Johns Hopkins University

Rebecca Abers, Margaret Keck 1

The Political Construction of Decision-Making Power

in River Basin Committees1

Over the last twenty years, we have seen a worldwide trend towards inclusion

of participatory deliberative bodies in the process of public decision-making. Such

forums are created for a variety of purposes, including democratization of access to

decision-making, enhanced public sector accountability, pooling information and

resources, reducing transaction costs, and solving problems. Responding to

Constitutional mandates, demands from social movements, and the international

diffusion of the idea that governance mechanisms can supplement (or replace) state

capacity, tens of thousands of deliberative councils have been set up throughout

Brazil. A main focus of institutional reform in the water management sector, the focus

of this paper, has been the creation of new deliberative bodies at the River Basin

level, called River Basin Committees. These bodies bring together actors from local,

state and (when applicable) federal government, civil society, and large water users

ranging from sanitation companies, to industries, to farmers. Many proponents hoped

that these new arenas would transform decision-making in the water sector,

guaranteeing that multiple interests and viewpoints be considered in management

decisions and building commitment among the vast diversity of private and public

actors who have a stake in how water is managed.

Simply put, our research makes it very clear that the existence of a

participatory deliberative body does not ensure that it can actually deliberate, make

decisions, and have those decisions recognized and implemented. Its formal

creation does not give it political authority in practice. For that to occur, it must

become a political space within which conflicts can be expressed and examined, and

1The authors benefited from financial support from the following at some point during the research for this article: Grants to the Watermark Project / Projeto Marca d’Água from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the Fundo Setorial de Recursos Hídricos / Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology; Grants to the authors from the National Science Foundation (International Post-Doctoral Fellowship GRANT # 0107314) to Abers; and from the MacArthur Program on Global Security and Sustainability, Research and Writing Competition to Abers and Keck. .


where deliberations influence public decisions and state action.2 Among the 14 river

basin committees whose evolution we have followed closely for the last eight years,

some have not gotten off the ground, and others have developed considerable

capacity to mobilize resources and implement actions. Some have gained public

visibility and influence. Some have had spurts of positive action, only to fall back into

relative stasis. Only a very few have ever managed to exercise the statutory powers

they supposedly possess. How can we account for these differences? How do novel

institutional actors construct political authority?

In the case of water policy, the answer to this question is particularly tricky,

because “management” occurs through the complex interactions of a remarkable

number of public and private activities conducted by thirsty individuals, sanitation

companies, dam operators, farmers, industries, tourist enterprises, tree planters and

tree cutters, municipal planners, residents of squatter settlements, golf course

planners, environmental agencies at all levels, energy companies and agencies, and

on and on. However much everyone might agree on the goal of ample quantities of

clean water for all users and uses, in fact there are highly divergent sets of rules and

norms of behavior governing the different kinds of interests involved. Despite

considerable institutional reorganization in the interest of rationalizing and making

more integrated the management of water in Brazil, there are still myriad systems of

institutions, organizations, and rules, with no clear hierarchy among them. Following

the work of Raustiala and Victor (2004), we conceive of this arrangement as a

"regime complex", or an institutional system characterized by a "horizontal,

overlapping structure and the presence of divergent rules and norms" (305). Creating

a new decision-making body within a regime complex raises particular challenges

because authority not only can be vetoed by but also must be recognized by a

multiplicity of actors who likely understand the role of that body in different ways.

In our eight year study of river basin committees, we initially expected that

differences in socioeconomic and political variables on the one hand and in the

characteristic types of water problems of the region on the other would predict the

success or failure of participatory water management bodies. Thus, more developed

regions with greater institutional capacity should produce more successful

2 Much of the literature on collaborative governance institutions focuses exclusively on their capacity to produce cooperation, and avoids the problem of political authority and power. For a recent critique, see

Moe 2005.


committees; water problems whose solutions provided tangible, selective benefits

were more conducive to successful shared governance than those with high likely

incidence of free riding (diffuse pollution, for example). While not irrelevant, these

explanations did not prove robust. Socioeconomic development and institutional

capacity did not tell us why governments in some states showed no interest in

managing water at all, nor could it explain why committee mobilization and

effectiveness seemed to vary so dramatically within states.

Our next set of explanations focused on the internal processes of committees.

We hypothesized that in some committees, dedicated leaders or core groups made

creative use of resources available to committee members themselves, built social

capital through concrete practices and problem solving, and could then invest that

social capital in larger undertakings. This proved to be quite a robust finding, but still

an insufficient one. It could not show how a movement from essentially voluntary

activity to political authority – and the power to have decisions implemented even in

the face of opposition – could possibly take place.

For the committees to occupy the public role they were set up to play,

cooperation among members did not suffice: there had to be active and reciprocal

engagement with other parts of the water management system, most especially with

the state. The members of these bodies had not only to expand their social capital

by collaborating among themselves but also to develop political capital that could

garner them influence over political decision-making. This, according to Sorenson

and Torfing (2003:610), who are among an emerging group of authors to use this

term, requires gaining 1) “access” to the decision-making processes, 2) “the

capability to make a difference in these processes”, and 3) “the perception of

themselves as political actors” (see also Birner and Wittmer 2003).

In this paper, we explore how local actors built (or failed to build) both social

and political capital in three river basins that we have been studying since 2001,

where the political outcomes of participatory water management differ greatly. In

none of them did the organizing process begin with strong governmental support or

significant resources. In the Paranoá Lake basin, which lies in the central part of

Brazil’s Federal District (Brasília), a group of actors started a movement in 2000 that

successfully brought about new water legislation and a commission to create a river

basin committee. However, lacking both government support and sustained civic

mobilizing, the process stalled and the committee has yet to start functioning. In the


Itajaí river basin, in Santa Catarina State, the state government’s neglect of flood

control precipitated the mobilization of a group of non-state actors. This group

became the catalyst for formation of a basin committee, gradually building the

organizational strength and autonomous fundraising capacity to carry out projects in

all of the basin’s 47 municipalities. Nonetheless, the committee still cannot attract

investment and support from the state government, preventing the kind of large scale

planning and management of water that committees were initially expected to do.

The Velhas river basin committee, in Minas Gerais State, underwent the most

surprising transformation. Hastily created only “on paper” to fulfill the state

government’s commitment to an international lender, it was transformed after being

taken over by an environmentalist civic organization that had built a network of state

and non-state actors throughout the basin.. The state government adopted the

committee’s project of cleaning up the Velhas River and has made major investments

to that end. 3

We proceed as follows. First, we situate our approach theoretically in relation

to scholarship on participatory governance, power and political authority, and regime

complexes. We then describe the reorganization of Brazil’s water resources

management system and the configuration of its components as a “regime complex,”

and place river basin committees within that context. Third, we discuss the evolution

of above three committees, referring occasionally to others. Finally, we attempt to

specify some of the variables whose interaction appear to us crucially important, if

not causally determinant, for explaining the construction of political authority by new

public entities.

Political Authority and Regime Complexes

Most scholarship on participatory deliberative bodies locates them in a kind of

public space in construction, expecting inclusive or collaborative aspects to make a

3 The research was conducted through interviews and document collection over an eight year period, largely in the context of the Watermark Project. The Watermark Project is a network of researchers at Brazilian and US Universities that has been accompanying the evolution of river basin institutions since the beginning of the decade – see www.marcadagua.org.br. In 2001, the Watermark Project conducted interview and document collection and analysis in 23 river basins, under the coordination of Abers. In 2004, a sample survey was conducted among members of 14 river basin committees and 4 river basin consortia. The project supported as well the elaboration of 19 master´s and doctoral dissertations on river basin politics. In depth, semi-strucutred interviews were conducted by Abers, Keck, and research assistant, Ana Karine Pereira in the Velhas, Itajai, Litoral Norte, and Paranoá committees in 2001, 2003, and 2007.


political system more democratic, accountable, and publicly minded. The

[democratic] political system, in this view, is heterogeneous, with room for

majoritarian decisional and executive structures, occasions for direct democracy, and

deliberative spaces in which participants attempt to achieve consensus or negotiate

agreements among a wider range of interests and views than would be accurately

reflected in legislatures or state agencies – albeit regarding a limited range of issues.

For many authors, the possibility of greater inclusion, or more effective harmonization

of stakeholder interests, renders instances of direct and/or deliberative democracy

more interesting and in some respects “more democratic” than the more traditional

representative and electoral arenas.

An expanding literature on new deliberative arrangements in Brazil and

elsewhere4 has made it clear, however, that their formal creation does not lead

immediately to a transformation of government decision-making processes. Where

deliberation fails to affect outcomes, it tends to lose legitimacy (Lubell et al. 2005:

280-85), and many erstwhile proponents of stakeholder councils today worry that

they mainly function to legitimate the status-quo. Where this occurs, it seems likely

that societal actors will lose interest. If a potential participant does not think that the

structured public deliberations of participatory governance bodies will produce

results, she will most likely take her energies elsewhere – to an NGO, for example --

unless participating has other benefits, such as affording her an unusually good

platform for voice or for networking. Volunteerism in the service of the public good

must either develop resonance with public authority, or find other, usually private,

resources with which to carry out projects and programs.5

This means that somehow, what goes on in deliberative arenas must affect

the configuration and exercise of power. We understand power in the three-

dimensional sense proposed by Steven Lukes (2005[1974]). With the Pluralists, he

locates power’s first dimension in the ability of those who have it to control the

outcomes of decisions to their benefit; it can be measured by effects. However,

Lukes argued that this view fails to recognize two other important dimensions of

4 See, for example, Abers (2000); Avritzer (2002, 2003); Dagnino (2002); Santos (2002); Santos Jr., Queiroz & Azevedo, (2004); and Tatagiba (2002) 5 One of the rather extraordinary threads running throughout our study of river basin committees is the remarkable and sustained level of activism by people who, committed to sustainable water management, continue to try to harness their energies to a public project – despite the continued lack of commitment from state authorities.


power. A second form is present in the ways that the position of actors in social

structures allows them to control what issues come onto the agenda. This power

laden process of agenda formation predates the kinds of political competitions that

result in winners and losers. This version of power was proposed by elite theorists

such as C.Wright Mills (1956) and Bachrach and Baratz (1970). Finally, Lukes notes,

the ability to shape which issues are to be understood as political issues at all is also

a form of power. Such a version of power incorporates a Gramscian understanding of

the role of ideology. Thus power involves outcomes, positions, and cognitive framing.

For a new decision-making institution to actually have political authority, it must be

able to influence outcomes, to define agendas, and to become a source or arena for

defining which issues are politically relevant.

New political arenas may lack power for two reasons. On the one hand, they

may lack internal resources: their members may not have what Sorenson and Torfing

(2003) call political capital – or the political rights, resources and competencies that

allow them to gain influence over political decisions. On the other hand, such arenas

are inserted in political spaces that may fail to recognize them or that may even veto

their attempt to influence the actions other actors – making decisions, for example,

about the projects and programs state agencies that should be allowed to implement

or the rules about private behavior that state agencies should enforce. This problem

is typically discussed in the literature on participation as related to the political will6 or

political interests7 of the state agency that are supposed to devolve power to

participatory arenas. Our research on water politics suggest that the problem can be

much more complicated than one of devolution from one power holding body to

another, because in many policy arenas, power is not concentrated in the hands of a

single public agency (Abers, 2007; Abers and Keck, 2008,forthcoming).

Although participatory governance bodies are frequently studied on their own,

they are almost always part of much larger sets of inter-institutional relations. Water

resource management takes place (or fails to) within a remarkably complex issue

area, in which institutional interactions occur at multiple levels of the political system,

both horizontally and vertically, and moreover include among their principal actors

powerful private interests. Coordination problems abound: the definition of the

6 Avritzer (2003), for example, suggests that a key factor in the success of Participatory Budget policies is the existence of a participatory political project in the local government. 7 Abers (2000, 2003), for example, suggests that participatory policies are only likely to be implemented if doing so is understood by state actors as in their own political interest.


system itself is contested both actively and passively; different components of the

system operate according to different definitions, play by different rules, and have

different interests and goals; and the practical coordination of decisions involved in

resolving any given dispute normally require the interaction of multiple components.

This kind of complexity is constitutive of what Raustiala and Victor call a

regime complex: “an array of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical institutions

governing a particular issue area”(2004: 279). This conception seems to describe

well those political projects that seek to integrate previously distinct institutions,

actors, and policy arenas. Such configurations combine distinct fora, in each of

which different sets of actors act according to expectations drawn from different legal

stipulations and institutional arrangements. Although clearly interconnected,

agreements reached in one forum do not necessarily extend to another, nor is there

a well-defined hierarchy according to which one set of decisions trumps another

(Ibid.). 8

Raustiala and Victor propose that the evolutionary dynamics of regime

complexes differ in a variety of ways from those of institutional arrangements with

more established definitions and boundaries.

“In a regime complex…negotiations over most substantive rules commence with an elaborate and dispersed institutional framework already in place. The institutional slate is not clean. Ideas, interests, and expectations frequently are already aligned around some set of existing rules and concepts, though these rules and concepts can and do contradict one another - especially when underlying interests are contested and in flux. Consequently, power, interests, and ideas do not directly map onto the norms that become enshrined in the agreements at the core of the regime; the content and evolution of rules does not trace neatly back to changes in the underlying driving forces (Ibid., 296).”

Several characteristics of regime complexes raise challenges for the proposal

that one component within them should be transformed into a central source of

decision-making. First, Raustiala and Victor note that ambiguity about the roles and

rules of different institutions favors powerful actors in a position to shop around for

the most favorable venue through which to advance their interests (Ibid., 299-300)

Second, change is more likely to result from the working out of problems arising 8 Although Raustiala and Victor develop the concept of “regime complexes” in a study of international interactions around plant genetic resources, their formulation draws upon the work of scholars of domestic public policy, in particular Helen Ingram’s work on water politics in the United States; however well these insights may have traveled into the international arena, we find that they continue to illuminate highly interdependent domestic policy arenas as well.


between components of the system than from reform decisions at the level of any

single component or the system’s coordinating architecture (Ibid:300-302) . Third,

the myriad inconsistencies in a complex institutional arrangement are more likely to

be reconciled in practice, through the implementation of projects and programs, than

through overarching harmonization attempts (Ibid:302-305). Thus although the

norms and rules embedded in the system’s design are clearly important and worthy

of our attention, much of the system’s evolutionary impulse will work through

incremental changes, from the bottom up.

This suggests that even when new institutions are created with ambiguous

roles in a regime complex, actors within them can develop strategies to try to

enhance their political authority. Indeed, it would seem very unlikely in such contexts

that an overarching power would ever “devolve” power to any component – power

needs to be created. Our examination of river basin committees suggests that this is

an arduous but necessary task: only where local actors within new deliberative

institutions struggled to build their own social and political capital were they able to

redefine the political authority of those institutions. Where they waited for the state to

devolve power to them, it rarely happened on its own.

Water Resource Management as Regime Complex

Up to the 1990s, such water “management” as took place in Brazil was

scattered, inconsistent, and specific to particular sectors or uses (dams, irrigation,

sanitation, etc.), and to wealthier regions. Water in Brazil can be in either state or

federal domain,9 and at both levels, dozens of specialized agencies implemented

their own agendas with little coordination. Municipalities, largely responsible for land

use, were rarely consulted by any of these state or federal agencies. Taking

advantage of the relative abundance of freshwater in some parts of the country,

private firms and public agencies encouraged the development of a highly

sophisticated hydrology and civil engineering capacity. Large dams fueled

developmentalist visions, and the focus on water for energy crowded out other

perspectives for most of the 20th century. For a long time, problems were addressed

from the narrow perspective of a particular sector, agency, or set of users. Private

users in a largely unregulated environment had little incentive to avoid pollution,

9 Bodies of water that run along or across state or international borders belong to the Union.


conserve water, or rationalize use. Environmental agencies and NGOs had few

instruments to ensure that as multiple uses competed for water, biodiversity was not

threatened. Although some effort was made to develop a more integrated approach

in some parts of the country, what few successes there were did not generate

multiplier effects.

By the mid-1980s, however, competition over water for drinking and

household use, waste dilution, hydroelectric power, and irrigation was evident in

some regions. Challengers to traditional engineering approaches to flood control and

drought drew sustenance from the repeated ravages of both. Water experts explored

new ideas, and many began to believe that a different, more holistic approach was

required. Proponents of reform drew upon ideas developed over the course of

decades of international meetings on water issues; some of them were active

participants in these debates. The emerging model, sometimes known as Integrated

Water Resource Management (IWRM) (see Conca, 2005), comprised a set of

principles that included management of water for multiple uses, planning decisions to

be made at the river basin level where possible, participation of affected actors, and

(most controversially) recognition of water as a resource with economic value, for

whose use and maintenance users should pay (Barth, 1998: 1).10

Beginning with São Paulo in 1991, most states outside Amazonia promulgated

legislation incorporating these principles over the next decade or so, and a Federal

Water law along these lines passed in 1997. The statutes provided for integrated

management of water supply and quality, identified the river basin as the appropriate

territorial unit for water resources planning and decision-making, and defined

organizational mechanisms for stakeholder participation in decisions at federal, state

and river basin levels. The system was to generate its own revenues through the

imposition of bulk water charges (cobrança) on major water users (industries,

sanitation companies, electric companies and irrigators) for the amount of water they

use, as well as for polluting discharges. Unlike taxes, however, these revenues were

to remain in the river basin where they were collected. Further, because

representatives of bulk water users would have seats on basin committees, they

10 Ascribing economic value to water resources does not mean fully commodifying them; it does mean that the cost of the resource itself, and not just its delivery and disposal, must be incorporated into the planning and budgeting of both public and private actors. The Brazilian government rejected recommendations from institutions like the World Bank that it adopt a system of water markets on the Chilean model.


could influence the uses to which these revenues were put, transforming the water

charges into a form of investment.

River basin committees were expected to set guidelines and priorities,

determine pricing criteria for water charges, establish spending priorities for

revenues, and approve or set up executive “basin agencies” to carry out these

decisions. Still, virtually any planning for water management required the

cooperation of myriad municipal and state government agencies and a state level

deliberative council on water resources, each of which had its own agenda,

resources, and powers. More than 140 river basin committees have been created

under a variety of state laws, in addition to seven committees in federal river

basins.11

In the context of a system comprising institutions with radically divergent

capacities, resources, and histories, the decision to establish a system of integrated

water management by river basin cannot really be called a case of decentralization

by devolution. River basin committees could not simply “take over” responsibility for

planning and decisions that previously, when made at all, had been scattered among

a multitude of different agencies and jurisdictions, at municipal, state, and federal

levels (and often remain among the attributions of these agencies to this day). Very

few state governments had either the information or the human capacity to monitor

water use, let alone enforce directives to guide its development. Further, despite the

fanfare with which many water committees were established, resources essential to

their functioning were scarce, late, or nonexistent. Implementation of cobrança ran

into a plethora of legal and political obstacles; further, it soon became clear that only

in a small number of wealthy river basins would it produce enough revenue to be

worth the cost of implementing it. The new system is replete with jurisdictional

ambiguities.

In this unlikely context, it is not surprising that the general view of river basin

committees amongst water experts is pessimistic. Lacking effective incentives or

sanctions, committees have no recourse when state governments simply ignore their

plans and priorities, or bypass them altogether on water management decisions.12

They seem like little more than the weakest link in an extraordinarily weak system,

doomed to failure from the start. Yet not all committees fail, and some of them start

11 http://www.cnrh-srh.gov.br/, accessed on 11/06/08 12 Neves (2004) demonstrates that the vast majority of river basin plans are never implemented.


badly, yet somehow find their footing. As a formally created institution that has space

for a variety of different actors, even toothless committees can sometimes become

arenas for generating and mobilizing resources and eventually even for transforming

what the state does and can do (Abers and Keck, 2008 forthcoming).

Of all of the components of the new water management regime complex, river

basin committees probably elicit the most diverse range of expectations both from

their members and from other actors in the system. Although state and federal water

laws speak to their legal domain of activity and attributions, they are only as vital and

as powerful as they are made to be by their members, and as their interlocutors in

other parts of the system recognize them as being. Unlike institutional components

of the regime complex with specialized jurisdictions, the river basin committees are

charged with oversight of the big picture in their territorial domain. Their job is to plan

and establish priorities for other private and public actors. They were not really

intended to propose and carry out projects of their own – this was to be the task of

their executive agencies, few of which have been established. Moreover, part of the

justification for assigning the planning and priority-setting function to the basin

committees was the fact that their makeup was designed to reproduce in microcosm,

the range of public and private components in the regime complex that were present

in the river basin. Thus at the same time as they exemplify an arena that brings

together, theoretically, all the organizations - public agencies, private stakeholders

and representatives of diffuse interests (civil society organizations) – involved in and

affected by water management, they are also public entities that must coordinate with

other organizations in the water management system.

This dual nature of the river basin committees – in which they are both pieces

of a complex system and microcosms of the whole – underpins paradoxically both

the committees’ weaknesses and their strengths. Members of the committee

representing state agencies and private sector actors can rarely make major

decisions binding upon the organization they represent. On the other hand, precisely

because they bring together actors from throughout the system, when committees do

gain influence, that influence can have ripple effects throughout the system. The

newness of the committees, and the ambiguity and variation in expectations about

them, probably makes them the main terrain of experimentation within the regime

complex. But their ability to transform water management more broadly – for

example, by promoting integrated water management among diverse organizations


in the system -- depends on the degree to which these “bottom-up” impulses can

energize the coordination and implementation capacity of other actors in the system

with the power and resources to pursue their goals.

In the following sections, we discuss the political evolution of three river basin

committees in Brazil in order to look at how actors within the committees dealt with

this paradoxical position within the regime complex for the construction of political

authority. We chose these three cases because they demonstrate the diversity of

trajectories that new decision-making arenas can undergo when examined over a

reasonably long period of time (both the Itajai and Velhas committees were created

more than a decade ago). In particular they suggest caution in labeling an

organization a “success” or a “failure”: it seems that a set of factors can recombine in

different ways over time resulting in different and changing results.

The Itajai River Basin Committee

The Itajai River Basin Committee is the only one of the three that began with

civil society organization. The Itajaí River flows from the interior of Santa Catarina

state in the south of Brazil to the sea, about a hundred kilometers north of the state

capital, Florianópolis. With an economy of middle-sized farming, artisanship and

small industry, the region is characterized by much lower levels of social inequality

and poverty than in most of Brazil. The total population of the basin is about one

million (Projeto Marca d’Água, 2003). Devastating floods have long plagued the

region, and efforts in the 1970s-80s by the National Department of Sanitation Works

(DNOS- Departamento Nacional de Obras de Saneamento) to control them with

contention dams proved inadequate. In the 1980s, work by a group of professors at

the FURB (Fundação Universidade Regional de Blumenau), spurred a group of local

organizations to contest DNOS’s approach, arguing that engineering solutions

needed to be complemented with reforestation and other soft measures throughout

the drainage area. This required an approach to water management from the

perspective of the entire river basin.

In the 1990s, a series of events created opened a window of opportunity for

basin-wide organizing.13 In 1992, two years after the government had abolished

DNOS, a devastating flood demonstrated the urgent need for investment in flood

13 On political opportunity structure, see McAdam 1982; Tarrow 1994.


control. In 1994, following the example of São Paulo, the Santa Catarina State

Assembly passed a water law, which called for creation of Basin Committees. Two

years later, participants in a meeting of civic and university groups called by

Blumenau’s Commercial and Industrial Association concluded that the new law

afforded them an opportunity to undertake the kind of basin-wide organizing which

some had long proposed. The water specialists at FURB immediately took a

leadership role (Mais, 2001).

Within a few months, the group had put together an informal Basin Committee,

made official by government decree a year later. The Committee had 65 members,

representing water users, civic organizations, universities, municipal governments

and state agencies. It started by convening organizations from around the basin to

come up with plans to solving specific problems, and then working together to seek

state or federal support to get the plans implemented. The first years of the

committee´s existence were dedicated largely to the organization of workshops

bringing committee members together to discuss and eventually consolidate a vision

of water management based on a series of “soft” measures (such as reforestation)

that contested the state government’s traditional approach to flood control, based on

heavy infrastructure in the river channel (Mais, 2001).

With no funding proffered for this alternative approach, in 2001, committee

members decided to move forward by pooling the resources of the local

organizations - the university (which also housed and bankrolled the committee’s

secretariat), the commercial association, and the municipalities in the basin (though

most of these were severely underfunded themselves). The resulting “Riverbank

Reforestation Program” involved forestry research, training courses for municipal

employees, and partnerships with 10 municipal governments for reforestation

projects.14 The Committee also organized an environmental education campaign, a

yearly program called “Water Week” (Semana da Água), in which schools,

community associations and other civic groups planned a variety of actions. Once

again, the Committee worked primarily as a coordinator of other organizations, with

few outside resources. Water Week involved 76,000 people in the first year,

organized in almost 500 local groups. In subsequent years participants have

numbered around 200,000 (including school children), representing about one fifth of

14 http://www.comiteitajai.org.br, accessed on Sept. 4, 2004.


the basin’s total population. Besides its educational purposes, the Water Week

greatly raised the Committee’s public profile, and its capacity to mobilize resources in

the following years.

In 2004, a major injection of resources allowed the committee to take its

activities to a new level. By that time, the committee had created an “executive

branch”, called a Water Agency. The agency won a national competition for

environmental projects promoted by the state owned Petroleum Company,

PETROBRAS. The resulting grant made it possible to build upon existing work in

environmental education and reforestation, and to add a major component designed

to help municipal governments create their own local environmental councils and

implement reforestation activities, for which the project provided training and some

investment. The presence of more than twenty paid organizers, backed by the

weight of the PETROBRAS name, who worked with municipal officials and could

provide money (albeit small amounts) for local projects, vastly expanded the

committee’s reputation and reach. This new phase of the committee represents an

important step forward in terms of resource mobilization: if in the early phase, the

committee moved forward by getting the members of the committee themselves to

donate their own resources to the cause, now the group has developed substantial

fundraising capacities, allowing it to generate resources from outside the

membership, indeed, from outside the region.

Yet, although individuals interviewed in 2007 were generally satisfied that the

committee had gained in public recognition and legitimacy acquired as a result of the

PETROBRAS project, most remained frustrated by the lack of state support for the

endeavor. The committee was still operating overwhelmingly on the basis of

voluntary civic action – it was, for all intents and purposes, playing the role of an

NGO. Even though several state employees do dedicate time to committee

activities, most do so as “committed individuals”- they do not bring with them state

resources, policies or programs.

In late 2007, in an attempt to move forward in this regard, Committee

leadership proposed a partnership with the state government to establish a water

user registry. Such registries, the first step in any broad based effort at planning and

regulation, still do not exist in a great many Brazilian states and, according to Itajai

leadership, state water official doubted that they could to create one without

resources. The committee proposal was to start with a volunteer, on-line registry. The


government provided some personnel, the software, and an official decree calling for

users to sign up. The Committee members did the mobilization on the ground,

disseminating information about the registry and encouraging users to sign up. In the

end, more than 8500 users voluntarily registered. Finally, after a decade of struggle,

the committee now had access to the most basic instrument for planning water use: a

data base on who uses water, how much and where.

The Velhas Committee

The Rio das Velhas Basin Committee started out on a completely different

track from the one just described. The kinds of nongovernmental actors that

animated the Itajaí process were barely in evidence in the process of creating the

committee. Yet, from its inauspicious beginnings as a committee in name only, it

developed into one of the system’s most effective – again with a central role for

university-based environmentalists.

The Rio das Velhas river basin in Minas Gerais has an estimated population of

about four million people, concentrated in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte,

Brazil's third largest city. After flowing north through Belo Horizonte, the river passes

through a poor and sparsely populated region of extensive agriculture and ranching,

finally meeting the São Francisco river 761 kilometers from its source. Until 2001,

there was no sewage treatment in the Belo Horizonte metropolitan region, and the

city’s waste left downstream stretches of the river significantly degraded. In the early

1990s the state government proposed to address this problem by means of a World

Bank loan to build two sewage treatment plants and other sanitation infrastructure in

Belo Horizonte. The loan agreement stipulated that a small portion of funds be

dedicated to improving water management more generally, including the creation of a

Basin Agency. With the project in its final stages in 1997, the state government

needed to fulfill the water management component of its contract. Since the state’s

1994 water law required that a Basin Committee be created before a Basin Agency

could be established, the Rio das Velhas Committee was quickly cobbled together in

late 1997. Little more than a “paper Committee,” for several years its meetings could

not attract a quorum even to approve bylaws and elect an executive board. Setting

up a Basin Agency thus proved to be far beyond its capacities and the sanitation

works ended up going forward without one.


Around the same time, a new civic group called Projeto Manuelzao began a

series of watershed restoration initiatives, whose importance soon eclipsed the

official River Basin committee. This group began when professors in charge of a

rural internship program at the Medical School of the Federal University of Minas

Gerais, led by Apolo Heringer, a doctor with a history of political organizing, decided

to use the program to promote a more environmental perspective on health. Interns

showed community groups the connection between water conditions and disease,

and helped organize river clean-ups and popular education efforts. This experience

rapidly expanded into the largest civil society program for river conservation in the

state. Within a few years, the Manuelzão Project (named after a legendary twentieth-

century figure who traveled the region’s hinterlands) comprised 14 sub-projects,

ranging from research to eco-tourism to environmental education in schools. Part of

this effort included the creation of a network of local government officials, civic

organizers, business owners and other local leaders throughout the river basin

through formation of community or municipal-level Comitês Manuelzão or Manuelzão

Committees (Sousa, 2004: 108). The project provided the committees with

professionals to analyze water problems, legal assistance to support public exposés

of abusive practices, transportation and other help organizing events, and so on.

Today there are over 80 Manuelzão Committees in the basin’s 51 municipalities.

Alongside this highly decentralized organizing effort, the Manuelzão Project

formed dozens of higher-level partnerships, mostly with public institutions such as the

state forestry agency and the state sanitation company. These partnerships usually

provided support to projects the agencies had already initiated, involving activities

ranging from technical studies of a particular water problem, to visits to schools and

community projects. In effect, the Project connected under one “umbrella” a multitude

of activities, producing a degree of integration that might not have existed otherwise.

It took several years before people involved in the Manuelzão Project began to

get seriously involved in the Velhas River Basin Committee. The committee slowly

began to get off the ground in 2000, when Belo Horizonte’s municipal environmental

secretary, Paulo Maciel, a water specialist, became its president. Under his

leadership, the Committee took the first steps towards creating a Basin Agency, by

installing a Technical Office to support planning and data collection. The committee

also began to exercise one of the most powerful attributions accorded basin


committees by Minas Gerais state water law,15 that is, to analyze and pass judgment

on permits for water uses with high pollution potential. The chance to influence water

permitting attracted the interest of the Manuelzão leadership. In 2001, when open

assemblies were held for organizations in each category16 to elect new

representatives to the Committee, Manuelzão sought to get enough of its own

affiliates onto the Committee to be able to elect Apolo Heringer as president.

Although Maciel retained his office in that election, Heringer won a majority in 2003

and was reelected in 2005.

In early 2004, Heringer brought the Manuelzão Project’s latest campaign to

the Committee, effectively providing it with an agenda and a deadline around which

different sets of activities could be organized. Meta 2010, or Target 2010 promotes

collaboration of state government, the legislature, municipal governments and water

users in a major partnership to make it possible to ‘navigate, fish and swim’ in the

Velhas River by the end of the decade. In March 2004, Minas Governor Aécio Neves

signed an agreement committing the state government to the program, and

numerous state deputies and private businesses declared their support as well. On

December 10, 2004 the Velhas basin committee approved a water resources plan

geared towards meeting the target (Jornal Manuelzão, 2004).

The Minas governor’s espousal of the 2010 target meant that the planning

process undertaken in the basin committee would have resonance in actual policy.

This was a major commitment, involving the construction of waste treatment plants

and sewage interceptors in the major sub-basins of the Belo Horizonte metropolitan

area, as well as watershed restoration, environmental education and extension

services, and the establishment of a network of monitoring stations to keep track of

water quality.

As part of this process, the Committee began to create operational subgroups,

including subcommittees (beginning with Ribeirão da Onça, one of the most polluted

sections of the river, and followed by five others in 2006 and more thereafter), and

specialized commissions on water charges and permits, legal and institutional affairs,

15 Minas Gerais is the only Brazilian state where basin committees must authorize large water permits. Such permits are a prerequisite for obtaining authorization for any economic activity that will use substantial amounts directly from water sources.

16 The 28 seats on the Velhas committee are allocated to representatives of state government, municipal governments, water users, and civil society, of which categories has 7 seats or 25% of the total.


planning and projects, and communication. In March 2007, the committee’s proposal

that the Associação Executiva de Apoio à Gestão de Bacias Hidrográficas Peixe Vivo

(AGB-Peixe Vivo) be authorized to serve as its Basin Agency was approved by the

State Water Resource Council. Nonetheless, it was clear that even with a

developing capacity to initiate water charging and an executive agency to do the job,

the potential cobrança revenues (estimated at around 50 million reais) remained

vastly inferior to the kind of spending necessary to meet the targets established in the

plan (estimated at around a billion reais) (Jasper e Alkmin 2007: 6). Most of the

costs for basin cleanup have to be borne by the state government – a responsibility

that at least for the moment, it remains formally ready to assume, in marked contrast

to the government of Santa Caterina discussed above.

The Paranoá Lake Basin

Our third case is a counter example to both the Itajai and the Velhas cases.

In both of those river basins, significant and sustained civic activism moved a water

agenda forward and associated it with river basin committees, despite absent or

lukewarm state support in the initial phases. In the Paranoá case, by contrast, an

initially enthusiastic mobilization of civil society actors fizzled in the face of

government disinterest. The Paranoá basin lies in the center of the Federal District

of Brasília, whose construction included the damming of the Paranoá river to create a

lake in a region notably short of water resources. The Lake’s purpose was a

combination of humidity control and sewage dilution for what was intended as a city

of no more than 500,000. The area of the lake’s drainage basin corresponds to

almost the entirety of the planned portion of the Federal District17. Indeed, original

plans considered the boundaries of the basin to also be the boundaries of planned

urbanization.

Brasília’s population quickly spilled over its planned boundaries; shanty towns

gradually became “satellite cities”. Brasília’s population now approaches 2 million,

about six hundred thousand of which live within the Paranoá Basin. The

shantytowns are not the only irregular settlements in the region; others are middle

class gated communities (condomínios) for the tens of thousands of public

17 Since the lake was dammed close to where it flows into the São Bartolomeu, the drainage area of the lack is only a little smaller than that of the river. This is the only river in the small Federal District that does not cross over into neighboring states, making it the only one fully under the Federal District’s dominion.


employees who can no longer afford to live in the center city. This growth threatens

the ability of the Paranoá basin system to keep up with the needs for sewage

treatment – despite the existence of some of the most advanced treatment plants in

the country. By now, most of the water consumed in the basin is imported from

neighboring rivers. Unique institutional aspects of the Federal District, whose

government combines attributions of state and municipal jurisdictions, also bring land

use issues in closer contact with water issues.

Historically, the Federal District has had fairly strong institutions in the area of

sanitation, but politically weak environmental organizations. The District Water

Company, CAESB, with a well-qualified bureaucracy and significant resources,

controlled water management issues. The Federal District was quick to enact a

water law, along the lines of the São Paulo example and revised in 2000 to make it

consistent with the 1997 Federal statute. The sponsoring deputy, Rodrigo

Rollemberg, was an important member of the opposition to the conservative governor

Joaquim Roriz, who had dominated Brasilia’s politics since the Federal District

gained political autonomy in the late 1980s.18 After this initial success, Gustavo

Souto Maior, a well-known environmentalist, and Paulo Salles, a biology professor at

the Federal University of Brasilia, both of whom were advisors to Rollemberg, set out

to mobilize support for creating the first River Basin Committee in the District. In

2000-2001, a politically diverse array of people from local universities,

environmentalist NGOs, community organizations, sports groups, industries, along

with a few state government employees working for the most part on their own time,

held regular meetings and collected more than 50 letters of support from public and

private water institutions, especially large water users. In November 2001, the

Commission to Create the Paranoá Committee was officially created, reserving a

third of the seats each for representatives of government, civil society and users. To

allay the governor’s concerns that the opposition would dominate the committee, a

high-level official of his environmental secretariat was made Executive Secretary of

the Commission, and the government announced that the committee would be

inaugurated by the following April.

In fact, it took five more years, and although the committee’s creation was

announced in 2006, only recently has the mobilization process begun for elections to

18 Before this period, the Federal District was under the control of the federal government.


the seats. Participants in the 2000-2001 process blame the district government for

stalling, accepting the initiative in word, but in not in deed. Legal complications made

this relatively easy. However, the 2000 statutory revision had also complicated

matters by giving power to create river basin committees to the District Water Council

– which was not formed until late 2002. During this period of impasse, the original

group dissipated. Because its goal had been to create a water committee rather than

to address particular problems of water management, it had no agenda of its own. In

this respect, it differed from the groups that animated the activities of the Itajaí and

Velhas committees. Oddly enough, the group rarely discussed substantive issues

related to water; instead, the focus was on the desirability of an arena where non-

state actors could have a voice in environmental decision-making. Some

participants, interviewed recently by Luiza Alencastro (2008, personal

communication), attribute this to the fact that the federal district’s water related

problems do not yet seem urgent. The government has kept up with the need for

infrastructure investment, both with regard to sanitation and drinking water. Other

specialists disagree, predicting that huge, impoverished settlements in the basin are

depleting the supply of well water at alarming rates, raising the possibility that

problems might appear much sooner than expected.

From Social Capital to Political Capital?

Despite much fanfare in the late 1990s, the odds seemed to be against the

emergence of river basin committees as vibrant arenas where politically important

decisions would get made and actions taken. For the many who expected that the

prominent role granted these committees in new legislation would soon make them

central actors in a system of water management by governance, the fact that so

many committees spent years getting off the ground was profoundly disillusioning

(Abers and Dino, 2005). Certainly the expectation was exaggerated in the first

place. Water committees were only one component of a complex system, many of

whose other components either did not exist or did not perform in the ways intended

by the system’s designers. Further, the “integrated management” of water resources

involves the adjudication of powerful state, private sector, and civic interests; it is

therefore a thoroughly political proposition. Yet, the legislation and the new

institutional arrangements required to make this integration happen were put into

place with very little attention to the political support that would be necessary to make


them real (Abers and Keck, 2005). In fact, for many of the water engineers

endorsing the new system, the whole idea was to insulate decision-making on water

management from politics, understood as unabashedly self-interested partisan

behavior by politicians. But the very notion of managing water in the public interest

requires the political construction of the public concerned. Unexpectedly, we

believe, it is precisely this job in which many of the water committees we have been

studying have been engaged.

The Watermark Project has accompanied the development of fourteen river

basin committees over the last eight years, along with shorter case studies of others

(see Formiga-Johnsson and Lopes, 2003; and Fidelman, 2008). The comparison of

these cases demonstrates a tremendous variety of starting points, trajectories and

results – suggesting at the very least that we should abandon the idea that just

because committees are born with few resources and little power, they are doomed

to irrelevance. Although many committees have progressed well beyond the mere

formal installation that the Paranoá Lake committee has barely achieved, few have

become central site in which important government decisions are negotiated and

through which resources for implementation are mobilized, as occurred -- eventually -

- in the Velhas River Basin. Most are somewhere in the middle, in that a committee

became an important political actor in the field of water management, but not a

central decision-making forum for the state. Generally, the problem is not that state

governments oppose basin committees’ performing such a role; it is that most give so

little priority to water management that no there is no publicly recognized role for

such a body to play.

Even though the committees in this middle group do not look like the

authoritative “Parliament of the Waters” that their proponents imagined, they may still

be the most relevant regional or state actors in the field of water management, if only

by elimination, as the only organizations that consistently struggle to keep water

management on the political agenda. This anomalous situation raises a number of

interesting political questions. What keeps them going in the absence of support

from the other components of the “regime complex” of which they were supposed to

be apart? What kinds of resources and strategies are available to them to influence

that context, in the hope of gaining the political relevance and authority they were

supposed to have?


Our research suggests that those committees that moved forward did so by

mobilizing the social capital and other resources (technical capability, money)

available to them and using it to build political capital. How does this occur? In a

variety of cases, we find that the groups involved started small, with concrete projects

supported by the resources of the people involved. In the Itajai Basin these were a

series of workshops to define solutions to problems and eventually the creation of a

project to promote that solution (based largely on the reforestation of river banks),

funded by the university and civic groups. In the Velhas basin, the Manuelzão project

branched out from a university internship project to mobilize dozens of local groups

around problems specific to each place: domestic waste from an impoverished

riverside settlement, erosion caused by sand mining, risk of overflowing residue

tanks of an iron mine, chronic dysentery in an urban shantytown. These kinds of

practical actions seem to be essential for building trust among actors, demonstrating

capacity for action, and creating a public name and legitimacy. In the Paranoá Lake

basin, where leadership failed to establish such a practical mission, and where, in the

absence of legal recognition, nothing else remained to bring people together, the

initial mobilization effort dissipated.19

What transpires through this kind of practical, collaborative action? We believe

that working together on small projects affords the opportunity to build and

strengthen networks among committee members and those they attract to their

activities. Broadening these networks in turn amplifies the committee’s resource

base, and eventually, we argue, its power. Networks in this case are structures

comprising linkages among individuals and/or groups, through which flow ideas,

information, and material resources. Nan Lin (2001a,2001b) argues that they are

closely related to social capital. Robert Putnam famously defined social capital as

“features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve

the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated action” (1993: 167). Lin contends

that the concept of social capital involves more than of the trust and reciprocity on

19 These examples are not unique. We have observed the mobilizing effect of such concrete practices in a substantial number of river basins studied by the watermark project: The Rio dos Sinos basin committee developed an environmental education project with local schools. In the Araçuaí basin (Minas Gerais), committee activities have revolved around designing and monitoring a World Bank funded basic sanitation project. In São Paulo, deliberated over the allocation of monies from FEHIDRO, a state fund for water management projects, has helped mobilize actors and creating a starting point from which to move on to more ambitious projects.


which Putnam focuses. Social capital for Lin is investible, defined as “resources

embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive

actions” (Lin 2001b: 12). That is, through networks, people can call upon different

kinds of resources held by other network members to make collective action more

powerful and effective.

By approaching social capital in this way, we can understand political

practices as navigating the ground between agency and structure. The structural

position of different actors affects their access to resources (Sewell, 1992). But actors

can deal with that structural endowment in a multiplicity of ways. When people with

different resources begin to work together, they discover ways to combine those

resources in new ways and transform their resources as a group. When actors from

very different networks begin to interact, this potential is particularly strong (though

by no means inevitable). The multiplexity of networks, product of the variety of

experiences and affiliations of each network member, facilitates access to different

kinds of resources and structures (Sewell 1992).

River basin committees – along with other similar deliberative arenas – may

be fertile ground for such network building possibilities. Although as organizations,

they have little formal power and few external resources, they do bring together a

wide variety of actors connected to a multiplicity of networks: industries, local political

groups, environmentalist, university researchers, and so on. This potential, however,

must be activated. As long as those multiple actors see no reason to act together, it

is unlikely that networks be connected and new resources generated. That is why

initial, small scale practices seem to be so important: by demonstrating that the group

has a capacity to act, they help build credibility and confidence for more ambitious

projects.

This sort of resource-pooling can help build internal trust and capacity, but

does not necessarily build political capital. Political capital is accrued insofar as the

activities of a committee extend beyond its members to mobilize parts of the public in

support of its goals, and influence the ideas and behavior of politicians and public

officials. This requires the development of projects that demand concrete, credible

commitments – which are only likely insofar as the projects can be made politically

meaningful to those whose support was needed.

One key source of political capital is visibility and public credibility, promoted

by certain types of activities more than others. The Manuelzão project invested


heavily in public communication, with a widely disseminated newsletter and regular

appearances in the news media, with careful attention to the message being

presented. For example, in calling upon Governor Neves to speed up the

implementation of Target 2010, Heringer publically reminded him of the state’s

renowned history of meeting targets, from the challenge of moving the capital from

Ouro Preto to Belo Horizonte in 4 years, to Juscelino Kubitschek’s race to build

Brasilia and develop Brazil (Lisboa 2008:4) The Itajai committee was much less

successful in this respect, but nonetheless has worked hard to involve municipal

governments in its projects. Efforts such as Water Week mobilized huge numbers of

people at a relatively low cost (by working through schools) and disseminated the

Committee´s name in the early period. Like Manuelzão, by involving large numbers

of ordinary citizens in watershed restoration activities the committee helped it gain

public visibility.

Outside recognition also seems to provide credibility and legitimacy that

strengthens a committee´s claim to political authority. Interviewees in the Itajai basin

repeatedly noted that the support from PETROBRAS for the committee made local

people see that it was a “serious” organization.

Similarly, the existence of legislation creating committees and giving them

formal attributions, however vague or weak it may be, remains a source of political

capital. In the Itajai basin, university researchers and other local people had been

trying for over a decade to organize people in the basin around the problem of flood

control to no avail. But when in 1994, the state followed São Paulo in the passage of

a water law that created River Basin Committees, the group had a new organizing

tool. Local actors believed that an officially recognized committee would have a

greater ability to pressure the state. Although the state government has remained

resistant, the committee’s official status is still a political asset allowing it to make

claims for political authority. The leaders of the Projeto Manuelzão group, by

contrast, initially saw no reason to expect that the rather feeble basin committee

being set up at the same time as it was forming could provide them with more

credibility or legitimacy than they could build on their own. But at a key point in the

Project´s development, attachment to an organization that had formal political

authority seemed politically useful. By transforming the Target 2010 into a legally

approved plan, the Committee was able to demand that it be implemented in a way

that was not available to the Manuelzão Project. Like the Itajai activists, the


Manuelzão leaders wanted to be more than just an NGO: they used the formal status

of the committee to give greater political legitimacy to their actions.

Not surprisingly, the ability of actors participating in these new arenas to gain

political capital is also strongly related to party politics. The contrast between the

Paranoá basin and the Velhas basin makes this clear. In Paranoá, the effort to

promote the committee was spearheaded by advisors to an opposition politician. In

this situation, there was little reason for the local government administration to

support the project. In Velhas, on the other hand, the leadership of the Manuelzão

project had political connections. Interviews repeatedly cited the close connections

between Apolo Heringer Lisboa and high level political officials in the state

government, especially the state secretary of the environment and Aecio Neves, the

governor. The predominance of progressive (PT, PSB, PSDB) state and city

governments for most of the period under consideration here provided opportunities

that were not available to the Itajai activists, who faced a much less congenial set of

governors.

Party politics seems especially important in river basins in close proximity to

state capitals. In Minas Gerais, the fact that the Velhas basin included the state

capital Belo Horizonte amplified the importance of political networks linking Projeto

Manuelzão leaders and state government officials.20 The Itajai activists did not have

the same kinds of political assets, but did have strong social ties in the region around

Blumenau, and were well connected both with regional environmentalist networks

and the national technical networks of water engineers. It may be that for them,

location outside the capital made developing high levels of local visibility and capacity

less problematic for state political elites than it might otherwise have been. Different

kinds of resources and trajectories, then, can be mobilized for different purposes.

Figure 1 is an attempt to visually summarize the complex interrelationship of

variables discussed here. As Raustiala and Victor (2004) suggest, in regime

complexes change is likely to occur at least as much through bottom-up experiments

with policy implementation as through policy coordination from the top. River basin

committees and similar deliberative arenas seem to be ideal for such

20 Apolo Heringer Lisboa was a founding member of the Workers’ Party, had been a well-known student radical, and vice president of the National Student Union (UNE) in 1966. One of his more notable acts of the period was, upon receiving his diploma in medicine in December 1967, to dedicate it to the memory of Che Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia just two months earlier. Exiled in 1973, he returned to Brazil (and Belo Horizonte) with the 1979 amnesty (Machado 2003).


External Support

Party Support

Concrete practices

People, Organizations,Resources

Political capital

Social Capital (mobilized

resources, trust, internal

credibility)

Visibility, (Public Credibility)

More ambitious projects

Legal Recog-nition

POLITICAL AUTHORITY

Figure 1: Building Political Authority

experimentation, because they bring together groups with a wide array of resources.

In the more successful cases presented here, leaders in the river basin started small,

with concrete projects that helped build social capital – an ability among members to

pool and use their own resources through networks, which resulted in trust among

members and increased confidence in the capacity to carry out more ambitious

projects. When those broader projects allowed the organization to gain public

visibility and credibility, they began to transform their social capital into political

capital. If the former is associated with an ability to carry out projects with their own

resources, the latter has to do with being able to influence other organizations,

especially the state. The ability to transform social capital into political capital is

limited, however, by the political context in which it occurs. Where the new

organization gains formal recognition (legal status) and political support from more


powerful, higher level institutions, they can move much further in the quest to

influence policy. Such direct political support seems to be particularly rare

At the same time as they illustrate the development of political capital in and

by the basin committees, the examples presented in this paper suggest that

committees may play an important mobilizational role for the system and idea of

water resource management more generally. Instead of being essentially normative

bodies involved in planning and establishing priorities that would be enacted by other

components of the system, the committees have had to ensure that the prospective

enacters were present and willing to do their job. Much more than “decision-making

arenas”, those river basin committees that gain some political authority are activist

organizations that promote concrete visions of water management and seek to

transform the system within which they work.

This activist role seems quite far removed from the theoretical debates about

governance and participation in public decision-making in which political science

discussion of this kind of organ usually occurs. Yet without a view of deliberation that

links it to action, the idea of participatory and/or collaborative governance remains a

sterile conception. By focusing on their actions, and not just on their [in]ability to

perform the formal roles attributed to them in water management legislation, we

discover in the stories of these committees unexpected agency. An assessment of

whether their role in decision-making democratizes public policy or not seems

premature, in that the first step has to be making the policy public in the first place.

And this is fundamental for building what Lukes (2005[1974]) called the third

dimension of power: the power to define what issues should be considered political.

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