“Getting Access to Water and Sanitation: The Case of the Stilt Houses on the Banks of the Rio Negro (Manaus-Brazil)”

As the new regulatory framework for water and sanitation in Brazil (2020), private companies entered the water and sewage service provision market, acquiring public companies, as concessionaires (30 years), or in public-private partnerships.

Using an Impact Assessment methodology (Williams 2004; Buravoy 2005) to capture social change at local level, the research question is how communities realize the arrival of basic sanitation services: an paternalistic authority where communities must rely on the basic inception of citizenship where communities hold the rights and obligations or the services work as the seed for social self-organization with the correspondent learning process with the private company and state authorities? The question makes sense because water and sewage services bring positive gains that go far beyond treated water and sewage collection and treatment. There are lots of externalities that transform the lives of these low-income families, especially improvement in children’s health and education, but also productivity at work, the value of properties, environmental conditions, tourism, among others. An example of a city operated by Aegea since 2018, whose vulnerable population already see benefits from sanitation is Manaus, the largest capital in the Amazon region, especially poorer people who live on rivers and streams, in what we call "palafitas” – stilts. From the development of the sociological Impact Assessment methodology that highlights the ‘sociological imagination’ of social change in different levels of analysis (material, symbolic, existential) with the participation of the families and communities, the proposal discusses the social change theory and the measurable material benefits that impact the people living in stilts and streams (Manaus). It is expected that this study could overlap the Sustainable Development Goals connected with the universalization of water and sewage measuring the advances in Brazil, comparatively to the world water and sewage indicators.