Innovation - Regards sur la Terreregardssurlaterre.com/sites/default/files/rst/2014-22-EN.pdf · megacities: innovation facing the techno-political Uhurdle rban development has led

Innovation has become the new buzzword across the globe. International organizations, governments, corporates, academia and civil society see it as the answer to the major economic, social and environmental transformations challenging the models of the 20th century.

Innovations are occurring worldwide and alternative solutions to the existing problems are emerging in all sectors: electric cars, organic farming, renewable energy and e-learning are good examples. These alternatives can be ascribed with qualities such as decentralized, frugal, flexible, smart and democratic, virtues that are lacking in conventional models. They are attributed with the potential to meet the overall global challenges such as climate change and the growing inequalities between and within countries.

What is the real potential of innovation? Does the rapid deployment of innovations lead towards a more sustainable and inclusive society? Can innovations and the emerging alternatives replace conventional models? Beyond technologies, what institutional innovations are required to support sustainable development?

A Planet for Life 2014 aims to answer these questions and explore innovation in all its aspects, through a series of texts written by international experts. The objective of this book is to analyse experiences from across the world and the role of innovation in a variety of areas of development such as urbanization, agriculture and food, the mobility of people and freight, education and the provision of water and energy to all.

The book includes:

• Papers by leading international experts and academics

• New perspectives through in-depth analyses

• Numerous maps, charts and tables

• A wealth of ideas for specialists and non-specialists alike: scholars, policymakers,administrators, concerned citizens, development professionals, entrepreneurs, journalists,students and others.

Jean-Yves Grosclaude, Rajendra K. Pachauri and Laurence Tubiana (Editors)Damien Demailly, Raphaël Jozan and Sanjivi Sundar (Associate Editors)

Innovation for Sustainable Development

A Planet for LifeSuSta inable development in act ion

Innovationfor Sustainable Development


9 788179 935569

Jean-Yves Grosclaude, Rajendra K. Pachauriand Laurence Tubiana (editors)


INR 655 / €10,9

ISBN 978-81-7993-556-9

A PLANET FOR L IFE 207

C H A P T E R 1 1

Bernard BarraquéDirector of Research on water governance, CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research) – CIRED (International Centre of Research on Environment and Development) and Professor at AgroParisTech, Paris, France

Rosa Maria Formiga-JohnssonDirector of Water Management and Territories, INEA (State Institute of Environment) and Associate Professor, UERJ (University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Water governance in megacities: innovation facing the techno-political hurdle

Urban development has led to the emergence of megacities, which substantially impact the environment and, notably, water quality and quantity. These cities now need to seek out land-use based solutions, before resorting to increasingly expensive technolog-ical fixes. Europe’s Water Framework Directive (WFD) takes a step in this direction by making the restoration of the quality of the aquatic environment a starting point for water policy. This concerns all users including public water and sanitation services. But this transition to the joint management of water services and resources is a challenging paradigm shift, particularly in megaci-

ties of the global South which experience difficulty moving from civil and sanitation engineering towards an environmental engineering approach. We illustrate these difficulties with case studies from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where hydroelectric projects have led to a crisis in urban water quality and quantity. What is needed is a shift from the concept known in Brazil as saneamento básico (basic sanitation, i.e., drinking water and sewer systems) to the broader saneamento ambiental (environ-mental sanitation, which also encompasses wastewater treatment and solid waste disposal, rainwater management, etc.).

Hydroelectricity and water transfers in São Paulo and Rio de JaneiroBetween the 1930s and 1940s, Brazil, like Mediterranean Europe, underwent a major infrastructure expansion under an authoritarian, highly centralized govern-ment. In this period, known in Brazil as the Estado Novo, the federal government

InnovatIon for SuStaInable Development

A PLANET FOR L IFE208

managed both electricity and water resources on a large scale. Water services, however, remained under direct municipal control until the 1960s. The system was funded from the public purse and the users did not pay for water, which encour-aged waste. Brazil’s engineers preferred to satisfy demand through the expansion of the hydraulic capacity and they remained more influenced by a civil engineering paradigm than their European counterparts (Britto, 2001; Costa, 1994).

After 1945 international financial institutions began underwriting national govern-ments’ participation in infrastructure projects. The US government led the way with multipurpose hydraulic infrastructure projects (TVA, Mississippi, Colorado) and there was a will to include the provision of water to cities. Moreover, in the English-speaking world many experts believed local authorities were incapable of delivering public services (for example the UK, see Saunders, 1983).

In Brazil, electricity for São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro was generated by water diversion schemes, leading in the long term to a shortage of water in urban areas (Formiga-Johnsson and Kemper, 2005). The Guarapiranga and Billings reservoirs and dams, built in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, carried water in a penstock from the Tietê river basin, where São Paulo stands, to the ocean, so that the resulting

FIGURE 1 Sao Paolo: technical solutions outstripped by population growth

Despite research into technical solutions, hydroelectric power and the supply of drinking water have gradually been drawn into compe-tition with each other in Greater Sao Paolo.

InnovatIon for SuStaInable Development C H A P T E R 1 1


steep gradient could power an electricity plant. After the Second World War there was interest in using this water to service São Paulo. But the city’s sanitation system had not kept pace with population and urban growth, and the Billings dam water was polluted: indeed, to boost electricity production, water from the Tietê, now a highly polluted urban river, was diverted into the reservoir (Keck, 2002). In 1992 environmentalists managed to stop the practice of pumping polluted water into the reservoir, except in cases of serious urban flooding. But tensions are still running high, as the electricity company wants to resume pumping, even if that water has to be treated first.

Conversely, another project to divert water for hydroelectricity production has actually helped service Rio de Janeiro’s water needs (Formiga-Johnsson et al., 2007). Two thirds of the flow of the Paraiba do Sul, which runs to Brazil’s east coast, are diverted southward towards the ocean via a small coastal river near Rio, with the same kind of gradient as for the Billings. This river, the Guandu, registered a seven-fold flow increase, and has thus been able to serve as the main source of drinking and industrial water for the entire Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area (RMRJ), some eight million inhabitants. But what little water remains in the Paraiba do Sul, downstream

FIGURE 2 The diversion of water from the Paraiba do Sul river

For a long time, the diversion of water from the Paraiba do Sul via the Barra Mansa hydroelectric infrastructure has facilitated the supply of drinking water to Rio de Janeiro. Water pollution and land use conflicts are now threatening this technical solution.



from the diversion, is now seriously polluted from various urban and industrial developments stretching down to the river’s mouth at the eastern end of the state of Rio. And the situation could worsen if the state of São Paulo, west, where the head of the basin is located, also decided to divert water to the city of São Paulo, or if the state of Minas Gerais, home to several of the river’s northern tributaries, decides it wants to use more of the water.

La diversion des eaux pu Paraiba do Sul par le biais des infrastructures hydro-électriques de Barra Mansa a historiquement aidé à alimenter Rio de Janeiro en eau potable. La pollution des eaux et les conflits d’usage menacent aujourd’hui cette solution technique.

Saneamento básico and centralized services: a tale of water management challenges in two Brazilian megacities

ThE 1950s: BIRTh oF ThE concEPT oF ‘SAnEAMEnTo BáSIco’In the mid-1950s, the concept of Saneamento básico came to the fore. Essentially, it involved autonomy of water and sanitation services, as opposed to urban devel-opment and urban infrastructure integration that characterized the previous management (Rezende and Heller, 2002). Though they remained under public control, both networks had to be managed together with a separate budget, by specific organizations. Planning and management were to be guided by the latest engineering techniques and entrepreneurial models, including water pricing on a per-volume basis. Improving self-financing capacity involved the creation of autar-quias municipais, i.e. new public organizations with independent budgets.1 Refuse collection and rainwater management, however, remained taxpayer-funded munic-ipal services.

Networks began to spread to city peripheries. But as soon as the sanitary situation improved, federal and federated states preferred to put public resources towards productive infrastructure (energy, transport) instead of local sanitation. Underin-vestment coupled with rapid urban growth created a divide between the city centre and the periphery: most low-income suburbs were poorly served. To compound matters, underserved areas often developed without public planning or control. No plan for water provision was made prior to development, and once it had occurred service was often denied because settlements were illegal. In addition, in areas that were unfit for development (such as areas that were overly steep, damp or prone to flooding), the installation of public infrastructure was usually technically impos-sible (Britto, 2001).

1. The equivalent in France would be either Régies autonomes or EPICs, but controlled by the State instead of the local authorities.



ThE 1970’S: EXTEnSIon oF SAnITATIon nETWoRKS unDER ThE chALLEnGE oF RAPID uRBAnIZATIon In the 1970s Brazil experienced intense industrialization, a demographic explosion and rapid urbanization. The 1964 military coup installed an authoritarian regime that instituted Plano Nacional de Saneamento Básico (PLANASA) in 1971 to stream-line its investments and overhaul sanitation infrastructure within 10 years. Central-izing administration at the state level was an instrumental part of the plan as it would permit the averaging out of costs. Each state created its own saneamento básico company (CESB). The CESB of the state of Rio de Janeiro, known as CEDAE, was founded in 1975. In practice, it took over water provision from almost every municipality in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, SABESP was born in 1973 through the merger of different administrative units.

Despite the focus on the expansion of networks, CESBs were public utilities encour-aged to operate like private companies. This meant prioritizing large-scale projects and quick profits. After a few years of initial successes in improving services, they were bound to run into financial difficulties due to the inevitable rise in interest rates.

Although the 1967 federal constitution gave municipalities the legal responsibility for water distribution, the new public policy reduced their role to signing conces-sion contracts with the state public companies. Handing over water services was their only means of gaining access to new forms of funding. For several years, most municipal governments did not question the new model. The predominance of the CESBs was the flip side of the denial of their constitutional responsibilities with respect to water and sanitation, particularly in the poorer northern states (Braga et al., 1995; Fabriani and Pereira, 1987).

This new approach had disastrous effects on infrastructure quality and the urban environment. CESBs rarely heeded local city planning guidelines, except where they coincided with their own interests. And the way Saneamento básico was defined – prioritizing water provision and sanitation networks, but excluding drainage and solid waste collection, and deferring wastewater treatment measures – led to critical situations such as flooding and the pollution of water resources.

ThE 1980’S AnD 1990’S: RISInG EnVIRonMEnTAL AWAREnESS ARounD WATER RESouRcES Eventually the need for integration between water resource and water service management became apparent. Environmental agencies were created to control pollution, and integrated water management was experimented locally by Greater São Paulo. Though these initiatives had little practical effect, they were important precursors of a new paradigm that would seek to not only provide water services but also protect water resources and improve their quality.

In 1986 a profound institutional crisis put an end to PLANASA. Its initial successes in improving the rate of water connection was linked to Brazil’s economic vitality between 1967 and 1980. But investment was too heavily concentrated on drinking water; sanitation and especially wastewater treatment were overlooked. Indeed,



the cost of providing water is lower and more easily passed on to users, delivering better return on investment than collecting and treating wastewater. Additionally, the percentage of the population able to pay the actual cost of service delivery was too low to achieve a self-financing system, as planned. As a consequence, PLANASA investment was concentrated in affluent urban areas, while connection rates in the poorest municipalities and especially in illegally occupied areas failed to improve (Barraqué and Britto, 2006).

State companies were blinkered by a monolithic focus on supply underpinned by a belief in unlimited resources and technological solutions to all water provisioning problems. In the 1970s, Greater São Paulo, still lacking high-quality water, under-took a new project to divert water from the neighbouring Piracicaba catchment. This project was at the root of the conflict between local usages and the needs of the natural environment that broke out ten years later, leading to the sweeping resource management reforms of the 1990s that began with the state of São Paulo and later reached the federal government.

There is no question about it: both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro suffer from poor drinking water quality and inadequate sanitation. How can water resources be properly managed before adequate sanitation systems are in place?

Environmental engineering innovations: Towards an interaction between services and resources? In Brazil the environmental engineering model is gaining ground, largely because urban and industrial growth are making water service and sanitation major issues. In the Alto-Tietê basin, for example, balancing water supply and demand for Greater São Paulo’s 18 million residents is a considerable challenge. Urbanization has created an intricate web of interests and debates on water sectoral policy, inter-basin trans-fers, and more (Formiga-Johnsson and Kemper, 2005). The same is true, though to a lesser extent, in the RMRJ: the Guandu has become very polluted and water must now be treated with large amounts of chemicals. Since the early 1990s, environ-mental engineering approaches are developing, including demand management, the development of more flexible water allocation rules, the protection of resources and water conservation. Since the Lula government, user participation and the manage-ment of rainwater and urban solid waste must be taken into account: it is the central issue of the saneamento ambiental.

In Greater São Paulo, state legislation has attempted to reclaim control over land use and curtail unplanned urbanization in drinking water abstraction areas, a return to a policy introduced in the mid-1970s. This has proved one of the thorn-iest problems to address, as urban planning comes under municipal jurisdiction (Formiga-Johnsson and Kemper, 2005). But the process also entails the imple-mentation of new forms of multi-level governance, since most municipalities still delegate water service provision to CESBs.

Moreover, the growing power of basin commissions has created a de facto interre-lationship between sectors viewed as separate in the previous sanitation engineering



paradigm. Thus, a wastewater treatment problem becomes an issue of good resource management at basin scale – something seen in France with Agences de l’eau. Again, this approach requires consensus on the definition of water resources within a basin.

What is an appropriate scale for managing services? The new left-wing govern-ment has rekindled an old debate between the return to municipal management and a renovation of the public companies managed at the federated state level. Since 2009 a new possibility has emerged as municipalities have finally been empowered to form joint boards to work together (consorcios intermunicipais). This model may be a step towards the solidarity-based funding of services at the megacity scale and finding better solutions to the challenges of urbanization. However, for municipali-ties to truly address urban fragmentation, a political will is required to overcome rivalries among political parties, and even individual egos, and between different cities. Consorcio ABC (a large consortium of the various communes of suburban São Paulo) and the Alto Tietê basin committee are promising steps in this direction that deserve further study.

ConclusionIn Europe, public water and sanitation services have long been managed indepen-dently of water resource issues, due to investment in drinking water and waste-water treatment technologies. Today these solutions are viewed as very costly, and attempts are being made to develop more long-term solutions from a land-use planning perspective, an approach encouraged by the EU Water Framework Direc-tive (2000/60/EC). Progress in decentralized technologies (notably on site sanita-tion) has highlighted the mediocre cost/benefits performance of centralized systems in rural areas and even in city peripheries. Decentralized technologies could well replace networks if an approach could be found that allowed the abandonment of the ‘all network’ rule without forsaking the notion of public service provision. In France, for example, the service public de l’assainissement non-collectif (public service of non-collective sanitation) was created to publicly control and manage the five million septic systems that still operate in this country, which has a low population density.

Even for drinking water, relatively safe alternatives to current systems are techni-cally feasible, but the institutional framework is lacking. Such alternatives might facilitate the development of more extensive water services in Brazil. Up to now, in this large country, the middle classes have been unable to impose a policy of user-funded public services with socially acceptable costs. The failure of the large-scale hydraulic infrastructure model has brought about a crisis in water quality without resolving the issue of quantity, which in turn opens up new possibilities. A longer-term relationship between public services and water resources coupled with more flexible technical solutions must, however, first clear a formidable political hurdle: achieving cooperation (instead of confrontation) among different levels of government. ❚


REFERENCES

Barraqué B. and Britto A. L. N., 2006, Urban water services: a sustainability issue at both ends?, Annu-al International Conference of Royal Geographical Society, London, England, 30 August - 01 Septem-ber.

Braga J. C., Medici A. C. and Arretche M., 1995, Novos Horizontes para a Regulação do Sistema de Saneamento no Brasil, Revista de Administração Pública, 29, 115-148.

Britto A. L. N., 2001, A regulação dos serviços de sa-neamento no Brasil: perspectiva histórica, contexto atual e novas exigências de uma regulação pública, Anais do IX Encontro Nacional da ANPUR, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 28 May-1 June, 1080-1093.

Costa A. M., 1994, Análise histórica do saneamento no Brasil. M.Sc. thesis, ENSP, FIOCRUZ, Rio de Ja-neiro, Brazil.

Fabriani C. B., Pereira V. M., 1987, Tendências e Di-vergências sobre o Modelo de Intervenção Pública no Saneamento Básico, Texto pra Discussão n°124, UFRJ/IEI, Brazil.

Formiga-Johnsson R. M. and Kemper K. E., 2005, Institutional and policy analysis of river basin man-agement in the Alto-Tiete river basin, São Paulo, Brazil, The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 3650, Washington, 53 pp.

Formiga-Johnsson R. M., Kumler L. and Lemos M. C., 2007, The politics of bulk water pricing in Bra-zil: lessons from the Paraíba do Sul basin, Water Policy 9, 87-104, 2007.

Rezende S. C. and Heller L., 2002, O saneamento no Brasil: políticas e interfaces, Editora UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Innovation has become the new buzzword across the globe. International organizations, governments, corporates, academia and civil society see it as the answer to the major economic, social and environmental transformations challenging the models of the 20th century.

Innovations are occurring worldwide and alternative solutions to the existing problems are emerging in all sectors: electric cars, organic farming, renewable energy and e-learning are good examples. These alternatives can be ascribed with qualities such as decentralized, frugal, flexible, smart and democratic, virtues that are lacking in conventional models. They are attributed with the potential to meet the overall global challenges such as climate change and the growing inequalities between and within countries.

What is the real potential of innovation? Does the rapid deployment of innovations lead towards a more sustainable and inclusive society? Can innovations and the emerging alternatives replace conventional models? Beyond technologies, what institutional innovations are required to support sustainable development?

A Planet for Life 2014 aims to answer these questions and explore innovation in all its aspects, through a series of texts written by international experts. The objective of this book is to analyse experiences from across the world and the role of innovation in a variety of areas of development such as urbanization, agriculture and food, the mobility of people and freight, education and the provision of water and energy to all.

The book includes:

• Papers by leading international experts and academics

• New perspectives through in-depth analyses

• Numerous maps, charts and tables

• A wealth of ideas for specialists and non-specialists alike: scholars, policymakers,administrators, concerned citizens, development professionals, entrepreneurs, journalists,students and others.


Innovation for Sustainable Development

A Planet for LifeSuSta inable development in act ion



9 788179 935569

Jean-Yves Grosclaude, Rajendra K. Pachauriand Laurence Tubiana (editors)


INR 655 / €10,9

ISBN 978-81-7993-556-9

Documents

Innovation - Regards sur la Terreregardssurlaterre.com/sites/default/files/rst/2014-22-EN.pdf · megacities: innovation facing the techno-political Uhurdle rban development has led