Redefinição das formas de financimento e gestão dos serviços públicos de saneamento: entre o direito e o mercado

Abstract

This thesis is intended to analyze how changes in the patterns of finance of public services have helped shape a new conception of public services of infrastructure, articulating and modeling a new logic of management of those services, in terms of public regulation and private execution. Furthermore, this work is intended to verify in what manner the specific nature of basic sanitation services hindered strategies for changing financial patterns and the formation of a basis for commercialization of these services, identifying the conceptual, institutional and organizational implications. We started from the supposition that the provision of public services of infrastructure is situated at the core of a conflict between two logics: that of social justice (distributive), which strives for the universalization of those services, and that of private economic production, which focuses on the notion of economic value and re-conceptualizes those services as undertakings of an economic nature, subject to the rules of a capitalistic market. Moreover, we suppose that, being that the logic of private economic production excludes some users, it meets confrontationally with the logic of universalization of the services, highlighting their public character. Thus, even it is capable of being conducted by private agents, the economic profiteering of sanitation services will tend to be subjected to a juridical regime in the sphere of the Public Law instead of to the capitalistic market. The work was structured in five chapters. First, we sought to understand the notions of Rights, Justice and Law and to verify the roles of Administrative and Economic Law as instruments of social control such as to create a stable legal environment, guaranteeing the permanence of the pre-established social order. After that, we made a synthesis of the evolution of economic thought, composing a theoretical framework to analyze the intellectual environment and the understanding of the relationships between the Capitalist State, economics and society. This theoretical framework gave us a foundation and justification for the analysis of the movements of privatization-deprivatization and centralizationdecentralization of the Capitalist States. Next, we analyzed how the restrictions on the use of Brazil's government savings and the process of breaking the patterns of state finance influenced the restructuring of public services of infrastructure, articulating and modeling a "new" logic of providing sanitation services. Last, we analyzed the conceptual, institutional and organizational implications of the modernization of the sanitation sector. Our work allowed us to observe the ideological foundations and the contradictions of this "new" logic of providing services, in a context that strives for the adoption of a universal rendering of sanitation services. What's more, it contributed to identifying new paths of investigation with regard to the process of restructuring this sector.