DEMOCRATIC CITY MANAGEMENT AND THE LEGAL EFFECTIVENESS OF POPULAR PARTICIPATION REGARDING NATURAL RESOURCES: USE OF AN EVALUATIVE INDICATOR ON THE REVIEW PROCESS OF THE MASTER PLAN FOR THE MUNICIPALITY OF NATAL
Democratic city management, based on popular participation, assumes a series of interdisciplinary relationships aimed at guaranteeing the right to sustainable and intelligent cities that depend on the supply of natural resources, especially water and energy. In this sense, the question arose as to whether it was possible to concretely measure the legal effectiveness of popular participation from the perspective of natural resources in the process of drawing up or reviewing master plans. In light of the above, the general objective of this work is to discuss the democratic management of the city from the perspective of the legal effectiveness of popular participation in the master plan with regard to natural resources. The specific objectives are as follows: to understand the meaning of the right to the city in the context of sustainable and intelligent cities from the international legal order; to discuss the normativity of the SDGs for Brazilian cities from a constitutional perspective; to understand the relationship between the democratic management of sustainable and intelligent cities and natural water and energy resources; to investigate ways of evaluating the legal effectiveness of popular participation in natural water and energy resources in the master plan; to evaluate the Master Plan of the Municipality of Natal resulting from the last review process, through the application of the instrument developed. In order to develop the unfolding of the context addressed, the case study methodology was proposed, analyzing the latest revision process of the Master Plan for the Municipality of Natal and its participatory processes from the perspective of natural resources, based on the Plan-Process-Results (PPR) method, enriching the bibliographic and documentary review basis of the research with more details throughout each chapter. The need to meet the aforementioned objectives is based on the importance of the Democratic Rule of Law and the principle of sustainability in tackling urban problems related to the exhaustion of natural resources essential for human life. In view of the above, the results obtained from the application of the Index of Effectiveness of Popular Participation on Natural Resources (IEPOP-RN) showed a concrete scenario of weaknesses according to the delimitations proposed in this research, which require the strengthening of democratic spaces with the appropriate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and openings to other perspectives and solutions in terms of urban sustainability.