Domination and justification in water governance practices in rurality contexts

• Grant number: 16/02403-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2016
• End date: May 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Rural Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Rodrigo Constante Martins
• Grantee: Rodrigo Constante Martins
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Issues related to conflicts over access to water in Brazil has received increasing attention from the social sciences. Since the early 1990s, the implementation of the new water management frameworks in the country - supported by decentralized and participatory principles of environmental governance - has been interpreted in their political and institutional dimensions of the public sphere and situations of legitimacy and domination. This project aims to investigate the water governance in rurality contexts, linking agrarian conflicts to environmental issues. In particular, it aims to interpretive understanding how agriculture's leaderships of São Paulo state has been building their representation in participatory water governance spaces in the state - especially the Water Resources State Council and the River Basin Committees. This investigation will problematize the use of economic enunciations in water management and the ways in which agriculture's representatives instrumentalize such enunciations as a reproductive strategy of a specific worldview about environmental issues. That is, it seeks to investigate the so-called "water crisis" from the economic experimentation of environmental issues practices, trying to understand how the market statements act as both descriptive and prescriptive reality in the modern environmental debate, responding to certain regimes of justification practices. For that, the study will be undertaken qualitative procedures of social research through exploratory research. (AU)