Municipal environmental councils and the environmental assessment index in medium-sized cities in the state of São Paulo / Brazil

The escalation of environmental problems on the planet has greatly impacted the quality of human life, imposing, in addition to technical challenges, complex political, economic and social challenges that, in the end, indicate a new way of existing and being in the world. In democratic countries, the ideal is that the process of producing public policies, from formulation to evaluation, should include the participation of society, not only to defend its interests, but also to control state actions. Since the Constitutional Charter of 1988, Brazil has stood out for expanding the participatory arenas in the process of production and control of public policies. The policy management councils are examples of these democratic decision-making arenas. Accordingly, the aim of this work was to highlight a possible relationship between the existence of municipal environmental councils and the results of the Environmental Assessment Index (IAA), developed by the Department of Environment of the state of São Paulo/Brazil. Ten medium-sized cities in São Paulo state were selected as the sample universe, analyzing the IAA from 2019 and 2020 and relating the dimensions of the index with the existence or not of municipal environmental councils. The study did not intend to establish a direct causal relationship, however, the existence of councils presented a strong positive influence with high IAA scores and improvements in the other dimensions considered by the index.