Auto de infração ambiental como instrumento de gestão territorial: fatores intervenientes

Abstract

The environmental administrative violation penalty is an instrument of state control over the economic activity, which consequently works as a tool for the environmental management of the territory, in which the environmental authority imputes warning penalties, simple fine or daily fine to the responsible for the deleterious practice of the environmental quality. In this article, we sought to identify the factors that significantly explain the amount of environmental violation penalty assigned in the municipalities of Ceará. Therefore, secondary data obtained from the Superintendência Estadual do Meio Ambiente of Ceará (SEMACE) [Environmental State Superintendence] and from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) [Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics] were used. The number of violation penalties embraced the period from 2012 to 2015. The analysis was performed from the adoption of descriptive statistics and regression analysis techniques. The main results showed that, in general, there is a low amount of violation penalties applied in the municipalities considered. This amount, however, is not conditioned by human factors which can potentiate the damaging acts to the environment. Yet, it is conditioned by the “distance from the municipality to the SEMACE office”, that is, by logistic factors which were not directly analyzed but are implicit in this variable. Thus, the empiric evidences suggest that the internal logistic of the supervisory organ is overlapping itself to the local conditions in penalty applications, which brings us to the underuse of violation penalties as instrument of territorial management in Ceará.