A conformance-based framework to evaluate the National Urban Agenda's impact on urban sustainable development in Brazil

Although national urban policies are implemented to steer urbanization processes, the systematic evaluation of these measures continues to pose a methodological challenge. We developed an innovative methodology for assessing policy outcomes based on a multi-dimensional set of indicators considering socio-economic and land change factors and applied it to Brazil. We evaluated the conformance of urban change with two cornerstone policies of Brazil's urban agenda: the Federal Constitution, which lays the legal and political foundation for driving urban reform in Brazil and marks the start of the country's re-democratisation phase, and the subsequent City Statute, which regulates the guidelines established by the former. Our evaluation spans 27 Brazilian state capitals from 1990 to 2020. We used content analysis to identify five main goals outlined by the policies: economic development (1), basic service provision (2), housing provision (3), urban compactness (4), and green and sustainable cities (5). Through a conformance-based assessment we compared the intended and observed changes for each goal in each city. We observed advancements towards attaining the goals, stipulated in both policies, for provisioning housing, basic services, and economic. However, a significant shortfall emerged in the realm of controlling urban expansion. We attribute the discrepancy between attaining built-up land change and socio-economic goals to the insufficient coordination between planning-engaged sectors and the influence of land market revenues. The conformance-based policy evaluation framework proved effective in our research and is expected to be beneficial for evaluations in other countries.