The state of Pará has made a major effort to decentralize its environmental management, although the lack of mechanisms to monitor and evaluate this process undermines the transparency, monitoring and improvement of the decentralization policy. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze municipal environmental management in the state of Pará from the analysis of decentralization policies and municipal performance in environmental management. The history of the policies was carried out through documentary analysis and the legal framework. The performance was evaluated based on the development of a municipal environmental management performance index (iGAM) and the perception of local public agents on the environmental management of their municipality. The methodology was applied to 143 municipalities in Pará and the performance of the municipal environmental management was evaluated for the year 2009 and 2015. The perception of the agents on the management was evaluated through a questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale applied to two groups of environmental technicians belonging to municipalities with “good” and “poor” performance in management. The results showed that the decentralization of environmental management had its greatest evolution since the year 2009, motivated by public policies and strong pressures to reduce deforestation, however, they lack mechanisms to monitor the quality of environmental management. The iGAM, characterized by land use change variables, which explained more than 70% of the total variance, categorized the municipalities into four performance classes (good, fair, bad and very bad), which were shown in maps. Between 2009 and 2015, there was some improvement in the performance of municipalities. However, the decentralization measures seem to be more political than environmentally effective, since only 21.7% of the 143 municipalities were classified as having good environmental management in 2015. Municipalities in eastern Pará had the poorest management performance in both periods, illustrating regions where unsustainable and misguided national policies have been fostered since the 1970s. In general, iGAM was positively affected by factors such as population, communication and protected areas in municipalities and negatively affected by rural credit, GDPm and rural environmental cadastre. Public agents, with more optimistic perceptions than reality, tended to qualify management differently than expected from empirical data, suggesting the need for mixed monitoring. The variables associated with changes in land use were also key to differentiate the perception of agents from different groups. A cost-effective monitoring of agents’ perceptions by public environmental agencies could focus on the variables that actually differentiate them in terms of perception: degraded area, secondary vegetation, abandoned pasture, deforested area; pasture area; rural credit and rural environmental cadastre. There is still a lot of room for improving the effectiveness of municipal environmental management in Pará. However, it is important to note that many policies with a profound impact at the municipal level are elaborated at higher hierarchical levels and, therefore, responsibility must be shared. The monitoring of environmental management in a synergistic way is as important as it is indispensable to improve the performance of municipalities by enabling the different levels of state public administration to evaluate, plan, monitor, implement and guarantee development in order to preserve environmental quality in the Amazon.
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