São Paulo is a metropolitan area in the Latin America that for a long time has been affected by and has been addressing issues of urban air quality. Over the past two decades the expertise and the political decision-making in environmental management has been concentrated at Sao Paulo State level, with the State Environmental Secretariat and its technical agency, CETESB, in the lead.

Lately, as part of the overall process of decentralization in Brazil, the municipalities of the metropolitan area, with Sao Paulo Municipality as the most visible one, has been receiving a greater role in local environmental management. While municipalities clearly have closer accountability with the electorate of the city, they still lack the individual technical expertise and the degree of inter-municipal coordination required to manage the complexities of policies and investments in air quality management at the metropolitan scale.

The federal government supports metropolitan interventions in air quality
management through national programs such as PROCONVE. It can therefore provide the support to both state and municipal agencies in Sao Paulos metropolitan area.

In December 2001, the Clean Air Initiative organized a workshop in São Paulo to improve the exchange of information and inter-institutional collaboration between different municipalities of the metropolitan region, and CETESB.