Management of water resources and drought in the northeast semi-arid: between speeches and actions

Abstract

The context of social construction of “water scarcity” with which the inhabitants of the semi-arid region have historically lived, leads us to seek to understand to what extent the management of water resources in the space in question contributed/contributes to the production and reproduction of drought situations in the semi-arid region northeast? Therefore, this article aims to investigate in the literature the way in which some of the management of water resources in the semiarid northeastern region were undertaken in relation to the so-called policies of coexistence with droughts. As a methodological route, we chose to carry out an Integrative Literature Review (RIL), through which we thoroughly debate the topic in question, based on a theoretical framework appropriate to the topic at hand.  RIL, a type of Systematic Literature Review, constitutes a careful way of searching and collecting information and data that serve to prepare an essay based on past research (MORANDI; CAMARGO, 2015). RIL's main authors were Silva (2003), Suassuna (20011), Soares and Barbosa (2020), Leite and Amorim (2020) and Neto (2017), as well as others who also have the topic at hand as their object of study. Among the initial conclusions we reached, we believe that the public policies for water management and “fighting droughts” undertaken in the semi-arid northeastern region have, historically, been characterized by fragmentation and the adoption of an almost always immediate nature, in addition to favoring those who hold local economic and political power.