Amazonia: Diversity of Actors and Knowledge

Edna Castro (Universidade Federal do Pará, Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos, Belém, Brazil)

Email: edna@amazon.com.br

ABSTRACT:

This study seeks to examine the mobilization condition of social players and knowledge due to a renewal in large national and international financing in the Amazon. It analyzes, in a temporal perspective, the surge of new discourses and practices of mobilization, as well as the deployment of these processes of political organization around the construction of large investment projects and the current conditions of construction of new political agreements.

Finally, this communication aims to demonstrate the collective mobilization which emerges with the growth in interest of the market on natural resources, examples in the Amazon. The social movements have traced lines based on a policy that joins the subject of knowledge with the processes of participation and democratization of its use. The urban areas will have a special chapter concerning this reflection, intending to strengthen the list of principles which they incorporate since 1999, the access to water resources as a right for all.

A finer understanding on the negotiations being carried out by GATS and OMC has escaped the debate due to the interests over the water market. This subject has been posed before the negotiations and international agreements based on the concept of water as an economic good. The Brazilian government follows with the understanding of water as a benefit which must be regulated economically, justifying its shortage in certain areas of the world and the possibility of producing growth. The reactions of civil society toward a little discussed process but of high social relevance exploded in different spaces until it was transformed into a Movement of Citizenship for the Waters, as a deliberative instance and a strategy of political representation. The defense on the use and access to water, under this perspective, is understood as a central axis in the battle for citizenship. Other social movements join together in the search for strategies to face the State official debate and the Multilateral Agencies, as it has been seen during the last few years in Brazil.

A first effort is to understand the diversity of concepts which has been produced during the last two decades on the subject of Amazon and mobilization condition of social players and knowledge.

Thus, the movement against the construction of river dams contextualizes the problem of water as right of humans and nature, in the continuity of its existence without deep impacts over its reproduction processes. Finally, this paper proposes a line of research that gives preference the understanding of the dynamic of large world corporations which associate the interest over water resources and energy, and its relation with the social and political dynamics in different countries besieged by large investment projects.