The Embrapa and the traditional systems of production of yerba mate

• Grant number: 17/03671-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2017
• End date: April 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Anna Catarina Morawska Vianna
• Grantee: Ana Lídia de Oliveira
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project has the main objective of doing an ethnography of the scientific practices around the called so environmental economic valuation in the specific scope of Project ARAUCA2, developed by researchers of "Embrapa Forests" in the Canoinha region (north of Santa Catarina). Some questions are taken as a starting point for this investigation: How are economic technologies mobilized in a techno-scientific context to produce a modified nature represented by market prices? How can scientists - immersed in their search practices - engage, at the same time, in the politics of preservation and in the scientific knowledge production about nature? What is the relationship established between scientific knowledge and public policies and, specially, between the economic valuation technique and the Payment for Environmental Services programs? How is the sociotechnical network that enables scientific projects built and who are the actors that compose this network? Briefly, the project introduced here is interested, simultaneously, in the science, nature and policy: in the science expressed in the scientist’s practices, in the nature produced by their practices and in the contextual policy in which this practices are inserted. The research effort will be to capture not only the mode by which nature is produce by economic valuation practices, but also to reconstruct this sociotechnical network by which science is composed, trying to follow the actors in their own paths in this network. (AU)