Policy Ideas, Capacity, and Inequalities during Crisis: Flood-Risk Management in Brazil' Subnational Context

Recent studies have focused on understanding the factors that shape governmental responses to crises, including actors' ideas and framing strategies for avoiding blame and obtaining credit and political support, the robustness in policy design and capacities, and governance capacity and legitimacy. We analyzed how the understanding and definition of crises evolve over time and changes related to the production, circulation, and usage of data, decision-making, and governance and policy capacity through a historical and multilevel analysis.

We explored flood-related crises, a growing relevant topic for Brazil. The combination of rapid and unplanned urban growth of Brazilian cities in the last decades and climate change has affected the dynamics of water flows in the country, and flood-related disasters are becoming more frequent and intense. We analyzed the case of the states of Acre, São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul, which experienced multiple crises connected to recurrent and intense fluvial floods in the last decades that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable population. This is an exploratory, qualitative, and historical study of previously conducted research, official documents, and the content of semi-structured interviews with state and municipal managers.

The analysis shows that the three states varied greatly. In Acre, the strengthening of national coordination in a different policy (water resources) triggered the development of administrative and infrastructural capacities at the state level in the environment policy, reshaping the understanding of flood-related crises among policymakers and allowing the development of policy capacities. In the other two states, the state did not develop a coordinator role, and fragmented and uncoordinated actions prevailed. The analysis of the three states show that they varied in how power is distributed among different actors at the state level.