Environmental governance

Abstract: The recognition that scientific knowledge is not sufficient to solve socio-environmental conflicts places decentralized environmental governance at the center of debates on environmental resource management. In Brazil, one of the procedures that regulate the use of these resources is environmental licensing. Research that deals with its governance focus on the critical analysis of public hearings, suggesting that it is the only space of social participation that exists. The most recent literature on social participation, known as deliberative systems point out that social participation need not be present throughout the governance process, but that it is important that the whole the process is connected, so that the deliberations taking place reflect, final, in justified decisions that contemplate all the actors that will be impacted by the decision, either by consensus or by agreement. From this context, in order to answer if, as they are being carried out, the mechanisms of social participation existing in environmental licensing constitutes a Deliberative Systems, this research aims to analyze and evaluate the mechanisms of social participation present in environmental licensing of the state of São Paulo and its influence in the decision making on the installation of potentially polluting enterprises, in order to base strategies of environmental governance for this public policy. It is exploratory descriptive research, based on the documentary analysis technique of the licensing processes carried out between 2004 and 2017, and legal documents; complemented by interviews with the key actors; which will later be analyzed from the perspective of the Approach of Deliberative Systems and support of Environmental Law.