Sustentabilidade urbana: a polifonia ESG na política ambiental de São Paulo-SP

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the adoption of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria as disclosed by the municipality of São Paulo in 2022, seeking to understand what the declaration of the insertion of good practices and ESG criteria in the urban environmental policy of São Paulo consists of. This policy incorporates discourse emerging from the corporate and financial private sectors in the city's urban planning. The environmental issue has gained strength since its inclusion in the institutionalized political sphere and predominantly consolidates a perspective of sustainability outlined by economic rationality, thus meeting the guidelines of the corporate sectors in their business and financial aspects which, to a large extent, are installed in all spheres of the social fabric through liberal reforms and austerity policies of the 1970s. In this sense, sustainable development and the sustainability understood within it are terms and discourses expressive of contemporary business and governmental practices that remain tied to the maintenance of the current economic system, whose rationality drives the complex environmental issues observed today. This rationality validates a 'discourse of truth' and constitutes a power struggle in the formulation of the discourse and the environmental political agenda. Underlyingly, the multiple social and cultural realities bearing their own dynamics with nature and the resources derived from it enjoy asymmetrical political ecological relationships and, to a large extent, are made unfeasible when confronting economic interests, intensifying inequalities and precariousness in living conditions that, in the urban space, become denser. Marked by the speculative performance of the economic-financial system, the co-optation of public agendas and urban management by market agents demonstrates the intricate relationship that constitutes them. This analysis examines the official documents disclosed by the municipality via the Executive Secretariat for Climate Change SECLIMA, the ESG Handbook, and PlanClima SP – ESG Optics, both from 2022, to verify what these declarations consist of. The results of the analysis undertaken and the discussions it raises demonstrate the contours of São Paulo's urban environmental policy aligned with market vectors by disclosing the adoption of the ESG agenda in the wake of events that mark the ESG polyphony from 2020 in response to market dynamics