O Procedimento Estrutural como ambiente de reestruturação do sistema de transporte público do Município de Natal/RN: um contraponto à experiência do processo judicial tradicional

Abstract

The practice of public concessions extends across several sectors of the Brazilian economy and plays a fundamental role in the country's development. One of the most important legal presuppositions of these delegations is the need for a prior bidding process for contracting concessionaires. The constitutional effectiveness of this requirement acts not only in guaranteeing the supremacy of the public interest, but also in the power of the granting authority to regulate the activity to be explored. Regarding public transport concessions, however, such determinations are not always complied with. This is the case in the city of Natal, where the transport system currently operates without any regulation, since a public tender for transport services in the city was never held. The precarious state of this service was the basis for the judicialization of the matter by the Prosecution Office of the State of Rio Grande do Norte. After twenty years of processing, however, efforts were frustrated due to the failure of judicial protection through the traditional Civil Procedure. Considering this, the present work aims to present the Structural Process as a counterpoint to the experience of traditional judicial procedures, with an emphasis on possible fronts of contribution of the structuring dynamics in overcoming this state of non-compliance. For this purpose, the bibliographic research is used as a means of understanding the doctrinal, legal, and jurisprudential aspects of the social right to transport, public concessions and structuring procedures. The analysis of the history of the city with the bidding process and the judicialization of the matter, in turn, is promoted through a survey of journalistic information and the legal analysis of the procedural records in a descriptive timeline of the case. Based on this, the reasons why the situation under analysis is a collective dispute in diffusion radiated in a structural modality are inferred. At the end of the study, it is understood how the combination of multipolarity, consensuality and flexibility of a Structural Process entitles it to the promotion of relevant changes in a bureaucratic order that causes litigation such as the one observed in the Municipality of Natal. In this perspective, the need for a preliminary diagnosis of the situation was also understood, so that the author presents the necessary guidelines for the Judiciary to formulate an initial plan for the structural reform.