"We are the movement": community organization in the struggle for access to water and sanitation services in the Campos Basin, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in Portuguese)

According to Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, Public participation is one of the principles
of Environmental Education, understood as a public policy focused on ensuring the
fundamental right to an ecologically balanced environment. Based on case-study
research, this article focuses on an experience of participation in public environmental
management involving a process of community organization promoted by the
Environmental Education Nucleus Project of the Campos Basin Region, in the State
of Rio de Janeiro, which belongs to the Environmental Education Program for Federal
Environmental Licensing of Oil and Gas-Brazil. The documentary analysis identified
vseveral forms of community participation working jointly with the municipal authorities,
including meetings with members of the local executive, participation in city council
sessions and in public budget hearings. A remarkable outcome of this participatory
process was the approval, in 2018, to build a sewage treatment plant in a fishing
community that has been affected by the oil industry in Campos dos Goytacazes.
However, at the moment of writing this article, the project was not yet completed.