The Health Sector in an Adaptive Dialectic Strategy: The Case of the São Paulo’s Municipal Policy on Climate Change

Sao Paulo, Brazil, is a big city that suffers the effects of extreme climatic events like intense rains and droughts. In fact, these circumstances are outcomes of deficits accumulated for years in the production of an urban space that neglected environmental factors in their management, construction and planning. As a coping strategy the municipality of Sao Paulo promulgated in 2009 the Municipal Policy on Climate Change (MPCC), whose original main objective was to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases. This chapter aims to analyze Sao Paulo’s MPCC until 2012 in terms of the Health Sector’s convergence and intersectoral actions, considering a necessary dialectic between global and local towards adaptive measures in the urban scale concerning to climatic variability. The content analysis model as a qualitative approach was applied on documentary data and interviews with public managers. It showed that the primary research hypothesis, which considered that the Health Sector would have its attributions restricted to perform the monitoring of air quality, was refutable. Instead, there was a redirection of health actions, in which a dialectical intersectoral positive relationship was established, with actions that could interact breaking through the traditional model of sectoral policies which are generally reductionist. The MPCC in the perspective of interaction with the Health Sector encountered cooperation among sectors of the government promoting and strengthening adaptive capacities under public health concerns. All of these advances could be possible even with the prevalence of an initial orientation for mitigation in this public policy.