Arenas deliberativas com poder formal, e com a participação de órgãos públicos, setor privado e sociedade civil, freqüentemente denominadas conselhos gestores, vêm sendo criadas em diversas áreas de políticas públicas no Brasil, inclusive no setor de gestão dos recursos hídricos. Neste setor, os conselhos gestores predominantes são os comitês de bacias hidrográficas, criados em níveis estaduais e federal, desde o início dos anos 1990, no âmbito da nova organização político-institucional de gestão das águas. Os comitês de bacias traduzem os ideais de gestão participativa das novas políticas das águas, por reunir representantes dos governos federal, estadual e municipal, da sociedade civil e dos usuários de água bruta, tais como empresas de saneamento básico, indústrias, agricultores e outros. As suas competências são amplas e variadas e incluem, dentre outras, as seguintes: negociar

This article examines the implementation of a bulk water pricing system in the Paraíba do Sul River Basin (PSRB) in southeast Brazil. It argues that four primary factors explain the successful negotiations for water prices in the basin. First, the negotiation process itself was inclusive and open rather than being imposed from the top down. A combination of market factors and state control (in the form of direct involvement of a federal agency) created a necessary balance in setting prices as it simultaneously allowed for powerful industrial sectors to negotiate favorable terms and for state and societal actors to offset the dominance of certain users over the negotiation process. Second, participants successfully demanded that the collected funds be reinvested in the basin rather than absorbed and spent elsewhere by the federal government. Third, a worldwide paradigm shift for water management, including the notions of water as an economic good, decentralization, societal participation and sustainability shaped the actions of key groups within the basin. Fourth, the level of technical capacity in the basin which reached back several decades provided the necessary foundation and support for the process to move forward. Committee members largely agreed on the primary problems facing the basin and on the necessity of implementing a bulk water pricing scheme in order to rectify them.

Building the capacity of water systems to prepare and adapt to climate-driven events has become an important goal for water managers in Brazil. One aspect of building adaptive capacity (AC) is the ability of organizations and actors within these systems to apply techno-scientific knowledge (TSK), in particular, climatic information, to plan and respond to extreme events. However, the way the use of knowledge interacts with theorized determinants of AC, such as stakeholder-driven governance and democratic deliberation, remains relatively unexplored in the empirical literature. In this article, we propose a simple heuristic to understand the relationship between the use of climate knowledge and participatory management and explore it empirically in the context of integrated water resources management (IWRM) in four river basins in Brazil. We find that despite an overall increase in the capacity of the basins studied to manage drought through time, the relationship between use of TSK and participation is not straightforward. Rather, knowledge use to inform decision-making remains mostly insulated, with few groups controlling both the process of producing knowledge and making decisions in times of crisis. Yet, across all cases, the continued exposure of river basin organizations (RBOs) to TSK suggests a growing appreciation for the role of information in supporting action and increased efforts by RBOs to develop their own knowledge resources to become more relevant in the decision-making process.

Better understanding of the factors that shape the use of technical knowledge in water management is important both to increase its relevance to decision‐making and sustainable governance and to inform knowledge producers where needs lie. This is particularly critical in the context of the many stressors threatening water resources around the world. Recent scholarship focusing on innovative water management institutions emphasizes knowledge use as critical to water systems' adaptive capacity to respond to these stressors. For the past 15 years, water resources management in Brazil has undergone an encompassing reform that has created a set of participatory councils at the river basin level. Using data from a survey of 626 members of these councils across 18 river basins, this article examines the use of technical knowledge (e.g., climate and weather forecasts, reservoir streamflow models, environmental impact assessments, among others) within these councils. It finds that use of knowledge positively aligns with access, a more diverse and broader discussion agenda, and a higher sense of effectiveness. Yet, use of technical knowledge is also associated with skewed levels of power within the councils.

In this paper we synthesize the special sessions of the XXIII Brazilian Water Resources Symposium 2019 in order to understand the major advances and challenges in the water sciences in Brazil. We analyzed more than 250 papers and presentations of 16 special sessions covering topics of Climate Variability and Change, Disasters, Modeling, Large Scale Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Education, and Water Resources Management. This exercise highlighted the unique diversity of natural and human water features in Brazil, that offers a great opportunity for understanding coupled hydrological and societal systems. Most contributions were related to methods and the quantification of water phenomena, therefore, there is a clear necessity for fostering more research on phenomena comprehension. There is a vast network of co-authorship among institutions but mostly from academia and with some degree of regional fragmentation. The ABRhidro community now has the challenge to enhance its collaboration network, the culture of synthesis analysis, and to build a common agenda for water resources research. It is also time for us to be aligned with the international water science community and to use our experiences to actively contribute to the tackling of global water issues.