Groundwater Governance and the Construction of Legal Indicators for Brazilian States

Abstract

The 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution granted a leading role in groundwater governance to the states and the Federal District. However, there are no studies evaluating how these entities conducted this process from a national public policy perspective. The present article aims to identify national legal obligations related to groundwater governance and develop a tool to determine whether the states have appropriately implemented them. Our methodology includes document analysis and interviews. The federal legislation provided standard mechanisms for state management, allowing for structuring a Groundwater Governance Assessment System (SAGAS: the acronym in Portuguese) that comprises 48 primary and 25 secondary indicators. SAGAS is a methodological effort to create a legal indicator to generate comparable and systematized data on states’ environment of governance to help identify management weaknesses.