A conceptual approach to public participation in the environmental licensing of small hydroelectric plants: state of the art of research on the topic carried out in Brazilian postgraduate programmes(2004-2018) (in Portuguese)

Public participation is an area of great interest within the Environmental Impact
Assessment process, and it is possible to find an extensive scientific literature on
the subject. Despite this, there are great divergences regarding this concept and its
objectives and, therefore, some authors have dedicated themselves to carrying out
literature reviews in the search for a better conceptual approach. In this sense, this work
seeks to contribute to these efforts and proposes to analyze how public participation is
being addressed in dissertations and theses that discuss the environmental licensing
process. The study used the Catalog of Theses and Dissertations of the Coordination
for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), from which 23 works were
selected that address public participation, directly or indirectly, in the environmental
licensing of Small Hydropower Plants (SHPs). Then, the analysis of the works sought
to answer four questions: ‘How is public participation commonly defined?’, ‘What are
the objectives of public participation?’, ‘Who are the interested parties?’ and ‘How does
public participation occur? participation?’ The analysis showed that there is still a lack
of theoretical depth on the concept of public participation, as well as on its objectives
and participants. On the other hand, the most common forms of participation, such as
public hearings, appear more frequently in the analyzed works.