Borges, Eduardo Bizzo de Pinho

“Transparência da governança florestal na Amazônia: uma análise de cumprimento da Lei de Acesso à Informação (LAI) nos estados” seeks to evaluate the extent of compliance with the Access to Information Law (LAI) in 105 state-level agencies responsible for forest governance in the nine Amazonian states.

As the quality of forest governance is a concept presupposing transparency and as the LAI is one of the most important legal instruments seeking to attribute transparency to the public administration in Brazil, evaluating its extent of implementation is evaluating forest governance and its capacity to formulate and implement quality policies for forest conservation and use.

With respect to passive transparency, 210 access to information requests were prepared, containing 3 sub-requests each. The requests had the following themes: (i) elaboration, execution and monitoring of policies related to deforestation (ii) transparency and participation mechanisms, except for bodies responsible for policy enforcement.

The result in the context of passive transparency indicates low de-facto implementation: it was not possible to make access to information requests to 12.38% of the entities, as the requests were returned or because of a lack of a medium to make them; merely 15.7% of requests were responded to within the timeframe, with an average response time of 11.7 days and a precision rate of just 5%. It is worth mentioning that the state of Tocantins had a considerably better performance than the other states.

In regard to active transparency, 5 of the 6 pieces of information whose availability is mandatory, according to article 8 of the LAI, were evaluated using metrics considering the completeness, accessibility, machine processability and timeliness (the last two only for information regarding expenses and contracts).

For this evaluation, the item with the highest average score was “expenditures”, a result attributed to the fact that the state government’s web page, in several instances, already made available information about expenditures, segregated by body. The second and third indicators with the highest average scores were “Organizational Structure” and “Programs and Actions”, information which seem to be easier to produce and whose dissemination is not sensitive.

The item “Answers to Questions Frequently Asked by Society” presented the fourth highest average score, perhaps due to the lack of a culture of releasing information in this format by the bodies. Finally, “Contracts and Tenders” placed last, perhaps because of the sensitivity of the subject and the greater difficulty of releasing all the information. In addition, 19% of the 105 analyzed bodies did not even have a functioning website, or any website at all.

Furthermore, a transparency indicator was elaborated, which considered levels of active and passive transparency. The State with the highest transparency index was Tocantins, followed by Mato Grosso, Pará, Amazonas, Rondônia, Acre, Roraima, Maranhão and Amapá.

These results reinforce the importance of involving states in the implementation of the LAI. In this context, and given the importance of the subject, it is fundamental to think of alternative strategies which could increase the extent of its implementation.