Região Metropolitana de Belém: uma análise da práxis do planejamento e tomada de decisão

Abstract

This work refers to the planning and decision-making themes which occur internally in the metropolitan region. The choice of theme was due to the increased importance of this type of regional units in Brazil. This importance was caused by the economic growth and the tendency of growth both in the number of regional units and in the scope of these regions in order to involve more municipalities in their composition, which implies an increase in the population quantity. This work was done through a case study. The goal is to identify and analyze how the planning and decision making of the Metropolitan Region of Belém works in practice with its positive and negative points. The research was executed in two stages. First one, address the definition or differentiation of the researched system and its environment, for which the strategy of answering the following questions was used: what is the objective of the existence of the Metropolitan Region of Belém? What should the Belém Metropolitan Region manage? The second stage focuses on the questions: how does RMB planning and decision-making work in practice, which may be favouring or hampering its operation? The concepts of communication, planning and decision making were used to support the development and understanding of the research questions, as well as the meanings given to the answers. As a method of interpretation, systemic concepts were used. Documentary and bibliographic researches and interviews were executed. Content analysis was used to analyze the results of the second stage of the research. The results indicate that there is no participation of metropolitan municipalities in planning in the Metropolitan Region of Belém and decision-making is individual for each metropolitan municipality. The research presented a different form of analysis of the Metropolitan Region of Belém using communications as a tool to differentiate the RMB's administrative political performance, and from this view it was possible to think of management models more suited to RMB as well as to metropolitan regions in Brazil.