This thematic area searches the institutional capacity of the metropolitan actors crucial for the idea of city-metropolis. Under this perspective, it is fundamental to unravel this idea and its implications in terms of values and capacities, both for the citizens, city counselors and mayors, as for the state’s agents.

The challenge of this thematic area can be synthesized within the need of analyzing the governance conditions and capacities of the metropolises beyond the institutional political organization required for sustaining a parliamentary support to the government. We shall investigate the planning and management capacities of the municipalities and collegiate arrangements, looking for mapping the position of institutional metropolitan actors in the city transcending the municipal territory, which is crucial in the citizen’s life.

The governmental institutions depends on organization and technical procedures, on the selection of priorities during its works, and on the development of human resources therein invested. However, the institutional environment only consolidates with a government’s ability to elaborate, coordinate and evaluate public policies, define and exert a government project, handling its power resources, gathering support in the society for ensuring legitimacy of the programs execution. Under this institutional perception, the institutional capacity is the right to the city, which means to understand the institutional environment considering the concepts of social inclusion, metropolitan conscience and the discussion about local and metropolitan identities.

On one hand, we understand the municipal institutional capacity as the administrative capacity to implement the legal instruments of urban policies. On the other hand, as political capacity for the metropolitan articulation.

A government must elaborate action strategies, goals, efforts for ensuring the interventions coherence and sustainability, and identify the causes of the social and urban problems, as well as the new situations and alternatives to solve them. Therefore, we question: what are the institutional, organizational, and institutional partnerships arrangements that aims the articulation with other municipalities of the RMBH? What are the channels and participation experiences of non-governmental actors in the actions of the local administration? How is the decision making process conducted, and how are the political and institutional conditions ensured for their implementation?

Herein we propose to evaluate the municipal capacity for shared management in the metropolitan level and the potential of planning and management existing instruments; to assess the municipal investment capacity; analyze Strategic Plans and the municipal legislation, aiming identify and diagnose the situation for economic development and labor and income generation, mobility, transportation system, housing, land regularization and environmental preservation, and submit their respective proposals.