Abstract
The latest Brazilian Basic Sanitation Act, Federal Low No. 14.026/2020, paved the way for a more aggressive model of inserting private capital into the so-called “sanitation market” by altering the way in which the service is organized within the federal states; by imposing the regionalization according to blocks of municipalities; and by modifying the contractual concession rules practiced until then with State-level water and sewage companies. In this essay, the authors analyze those legal modifications departing from the premise that, in this sector, multi-scale and multi-level power arrangements, visible or not, supplant local interests and distort reality through fallacious narratives. The research problem is to investigate whether, according to the new framework, water and sanitation are considered basic human rights or simply regulated services, questioning whether the model of regionalization serves as an instrument to promote regional development or as a pretext for the sector’s privatization. The methodological option covers conjunctural, historical, critical and comparative analysis of the national reality, in order to confirm that the recent Act promotes a grave change in the correlation of public and private economic forces in the sanitation sector, within the scope of the federated states and the role of the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), responsible for modeling those deals, which risks mutating itself from a development bank into an auctioneer that facilitates sales, so long as it does not question potential consequences of these deals, such as the risk of tariff increases, restriction of access to services by the most vulnerable strata of the population and illegal privatization of a natural monopoly in its essence.
Keywords:
Basic Sanitation; Privatization; Regional Development; BNDES
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