No permitting process drags on by accident. Having run licensing from both sides of the counter — as counsel to the developer and as superintendent of a federal agency — it is fair to say that most delays are caused neither by unreasonable agency demands nor by bad faith on the part of the developer. They are caused by three decisions taken at the outset, almost always for budgetary reasons, whose cost surfaces months later.
First mistake: treating the study as paperwork
The impact assessment is not a filing formality. It is the technical basis on which the case officer will build an opinion and, later, on which the public prosecutor will build a theory — or fail to. A study contracted at the lowest price, with a generic baseline and a prognosis copied from another project, is not a saving: it guarantees a first round of clarifications that consumes six to twelve months.
Legal review of the study before filing is the single best value intervention in the whole process. This is not copy-editing. It is verifying that every siting alternative, every mitigation measure and every commitment made in the study is legally sustainable and operationally deliverable by the company that signs it.
The environmental study is the first piece of the project’s defence — written years before any dispute exists.
Second mistake: accepting unworkable conditions
A licence is, in its most consequential part, a negotiated administrative act: the conditions. Accepting an obligation the operation cannot meet on time, merely to unblock issuance, transfers the problem to renewal — by which point the breach is documented, an infraction notice is available to the agency, and the room to negotiate is far smaller.
Conditions must be discussed while they are still a draft. Deadline, unit of measurement, evidence of compliance and responsible party need to be drafted with the precision of a contractual clause. A vague condition does not protect the developer: it merely postpones the argument about what exactly was agreed.
Third mistake: abandoning institutional dialogue
The environmental agency is not an opposing party. It is an authority deciding under deadline pressure, with limited technical staff and under external oversight. A developer who appears only to complain about delay, or who replaces technical dialogue with an injunction at the first difficulty, loses the one asset that genuinely accelerates a process: mutual predictability.
Qualified dialogue is neither informality nor privilege. It is the timely presentation of organised information, the formal record of every exchange, and the construction of a history that allows the case officer to decide with confidence. Processes conducted this way are decided faster because they present less risk to whoever signs the opinion.
None of these precautions is expensive. All of them are incomparably cheaper than a thirteenth month waiting for an installation licence.
Zilto Bernardi Freitas
Nearly three decades in Environmental Law from both sides of the table: Superintendent of IBAMA in Rio de Janeiro, municipal Secretary of Environment and senior permitting adviser to Petrobras, Transpetro and Shell.
Full profile→Informative content, produced for institutional communication purposes under CFOAB Rule 205/2021. It does not constitute legal advice and does not replace analysis of the specific case.
