Saneamento básico e sustentabilidade: uma avaliação do acesso à política pública sob a perspectiva das pessoas no território do Grande Bom Jardim em Fortaleza-CE

Abstract

The research aimed to evaluate the perception of people from Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ) in Fortaleza/CE regarding the public policy of basic sanitation in two of its four components, namely: supply of drinking water and sewage, in access to the service. The specific objectives were to understand the transversality of inequalities, predominantly environmental racism, and their implications for access to the policy; to articulate the theories of public policies, basic sanitation and political-institutional trajectories; to investigate ethnographic characteristics of the participants and their correlations with the non-implementation of the human right to water and sewage; finally, to examine the construction of sustainability at the local level emerged by the link in the community organization and its struggles. The inequalities that impact access to sanitation are exposed; a theoretical framework for public policies, especially evaluation; and basic sanitation in the two components evaluated. The qualitative methodology adopted is reliable for improving public policy in an intersubjective context that is inseparable from the Mynaio (2011) research. Primary data collection was carried out through semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and focus groups, between 2024 and 2025. Discourse and content analysis techniques were used to analyze the results (Bardin, 2016). The evaluation approach was the Sustainability-Based Assessment (ABS), by Chacon and Nascimento (2020), which focused on the perceptions of people in the territory regarding drinking water and sewage, in its four dimensions: sociocultural; economic; environmental, and political-institutional. The results showed that there is access to drinking water, but sewage is non-existent or precarious; the participants demand and organize themselves, as a community, in the fight for Good Living, however they feel hopeless and with shaken self-esteem regarding the implementation of public policy, and do not believe in the universalization of the service within the expected time frame. It is concluded that the evaluation of the sector is tainted by intentions and marked, historically, by hegemonic scientific procedures, which is why it has incorporated, for the most part, technicality. This research subverted rationalist logic by bringing popular experiences and knowledge.