Researchers

Marina Mendonça is a doctoral student (2018) and CAPES scholarship holder in Urban and Regional Planning, by the Research and Urban and Regional Planning Institute (IPPUR) of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She is part of CNPq’s Space and Power Research Group, coordinated by Professor Carlos A. Brandão, and the Urban Water Studies Laboratory (LEAU) coordinated by Professor Ana Lúcia Britto (PROURB / FAU / UFRJ). Master (2010) in Environmental Science from the University of São Paulo (USP); Specialist in Planning and Use of Urban Land by IPPUR/UFRJ; bachelor’s degree in geography from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a degree in geography from the Cândido Mendes University (AVM/UCAM). She is also a public servant in the municipality of Maricá, State of Rio de Janeiro, where she works as a regent teacher of Geography (15h).

Currently, she is developing a thesis research that analyzes the historical inequality in the supply of basic sanitation services in the Metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. The justification is based on the literature that argues that the asymmetry of access to basic services arising from natural resources does not result from technical elements or from the scarcity of “water resources” based on Political Ecology, Space Justice, Just City, Sovereignty of Water and Goods Collective Publics and Governance Capabilities. Empirically, the federative arrangement of the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro; legal milestones such as Federal, State, Municipal; contracts for the provision of water and sewage services; the public-private relationship in basic sanitation; and three sanitation scenarios in three different municipalities compose an analysis substrate. The investigation focuses on disputes, power games, political trajectories, history of party families and narratives present in the local government in order to prove the hypothesis about the political origin of decisions regarding the scenario of inequality in access to water.

Palavras-chave: basic sanitation, federative arrangement, political decision-making process, social inequalities