Environmental complaints in Aveiro, Portugal: actors, concerns, territorial pattern, and resolutions

Abstract

This paper shows the main results of an environmental diagnosis based on public complaints regarding environmental matters submitted to the Environmental Department of the Aveiro City Council, Portugal, between 2000 and 2005. The paper is structured in five sections. The first one presents the developed study. The second section brings the conceptual approaches concerning environmental grassroots movements, the main actors involved in these movements and the role played by local governance, and it succinctly reviews the most recent challenges regarding urban environmental quality within the European context as well as the main features of the associated political and legal framework in Portugal. The third section presents the adopted methodology. The results of the empiric study are shown in the fourth section. Finally, the last section critically analyses these results bringing to the fore the temporal evolution of the submission of complaints, the actors involved, the local environmental problems and their associated spatial pattern as well as the responses given by the City Council which provide a useful instrument to visualize and evaluate the environmental perception evolution and local governmental performance in terms of environmental planning and management.