Social tariff - culture and politics in the services of eletricity

• Autor(a) principal: Silveira, Alfredo Maciel da
• Data de Publicação: 1991
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Administração Pública
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/rap/article/view/8925
• topic: National Development Plan; sector planning electricity; public policy; public rates.; Plan Nacional de Desarrollo; planificación del sector electricidad; las políticas públicas; las tarifas públicas.; Plano Nacional de Desenvolvimento; planejamento do setor de energia elétrica; políticas públicas; tarifas públicas.

Poverty and social inequalities are issues which, starting from the middle '80s, are being included in the cogitations of managers and authorities in the area of electricity, considering the usual incapacity for payment of ample groups of consumers, namely those constituting low-income communities, which have been targets of special electrification projects. Such a difficulty makes itself more evident at the exact moment when a recuperation in the levels of tariffs is imperative for a continuous expansion of the system. That authorities have resorted to a conceptual and doctrinary elaboration of principles on tariff, making such principles a referential to deal with the social dimension of electricity services, has served as an introductory theme for this study, in which the ethical-ideological or pragmatic-political basis for actions effectively proposed are discussed. When they reach the essentials in the use of energy and when facing the limits of the system's expansion from a perspective of financing founded on the tariffs, those new principles stress only an aspect of a larger methodological and cultural problem. 80, this study proceeds to examine how ideological trends prevailing in both society and State have pervaded the particular line of thought and culture of sectorial agencies rendering services of electricity, creating a traditional form of knowledge biased by the strict objective of expansion of electricity supply, under criteria of economic assessment that neither explain the social efficiency and the costs of opportunity adjoined to its use, nor adopt an active restriction as concerns resources. This procedure has recently been part of a framework in which to expand the energetic infrastructure was seen as a very high priority in governmental plans. The complete and definitive reversion of such an approach in the current decade stresses the necessity of a cultural review, capable of preserving the continuity of planning and the quality of services under the new conditions and capable, also, in terms of the new features of the State, to eventually revitalizing the role of enterprises in the sector, as an instrument of both economic and social policy. Alternatively, enterprises acting as concessionaries of the services would come to make their decisions as determined by the forces of market