¿Qué tan “verdes” son los gobiernos locales y regionales? Un análisis a partir de su interés en la inversión pública ambiental en el Perú

The creation of a Ministry of the Environment and the actions to achieve the Millennium Development Goals show the importance that the environmental issue has in the national agenda. In particular, a way in which the local and regional governments can contribute to “ensure environmental sustainability”(Goal 7 of the MDGs), is the public investment in environmental matters. Therefore, the research tries to answer these questions: (i) Are environmental issues important for the local and regional governments?; (ii) Which barriers are affecting the planning and implementation of environmental investments? This paper considers the variable “environmental project” as a proxy for the importance of the environmental topic, because its implementation is a way to execute the environmental responsibilities that these levels of government have by law. Due to an inexistent definition of “environmental project”, the first step of the research was to set it using the framework of the National System of Public Investment. The authors developed four definitions, considering different criteria about how the concept of environment may be analyzed. Using those definitions, the research analyses some restrictions that this kind of projects have, for instance, the methodology of evaluation, the budget of the project, among others. The main results show that the narrower the definition of environmental project, the less the possibility to be approved and considered a priority. Also, the results show that these differences can be explained by the applied methodology of evaluation procedure and the cost ofthe studies of preinvestment. Nevertheless, these explanations require more research and are the subject of a future paper.