Legislative challenges and the oil dystopia: Debate on the legal viability of using oil revenues to universalize basic sanitation

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of the structural trilogy of the development process of territories benefiting from oil revenues: oil revenues, intergenerational policies, and the protection of fundamental rights. The article thus examines and discusses the legal viability of using part of the resources from oil revenues (royalties and special participations) to ensure the universalization of basic sanitation, which is understood as a fundamental and essential right for structuring a holistic proposal for long-term development. To do so, the content analysis method was used to analyze legislative debates on the topic of oil revenues, focusing on their distribution and use. The results show that there is legal (technical) viability in using these resources to ensure fundamental rights, such as the universal basic sanitation, but the bottlenecks imposed by economic and political interests hinder the implementation of intergenerational policies, creating a real dystopia between large resources and the development of these territories. Therefore, structuring more participatory governance models will be important to strengthen control mechanisms and allocation of these resources to fundamental sectors of long-term territorial development.