Entre papéis e bichos: a expertise das ciências biológicas no licenciamento ambiental e na produção científica

Abstract

This is an ethnography of the relationship between practices of biologists who produce scientific research and studies for Environmental Licensing in the state of Mato Grosso. Biologists, the main interlocutors of this research, act as both researchers and specialists whose expertise is triggered in Licensing. The arrangement of this ethnography is based on fieldwork in laboratories and zoological collections, spaces in which the "biotic environment" is constructed. In this context, the practices of the interlocutors are used to describe the relationship between the production of science and the production of bureaucracy. Among biologists, science and bureaucracy appear as dual and opposing, also as in intense interaction. It forms this apparent contradiction with the relationship of biologists with other researchers and experts, also with environmental consulting firms and with government audit bodies. Following the practices that produce the biotic medium in licensing explicit: a) a narrative about licensing in which they themselves and other experts do not occupy a pre-defined role; one that is composed insofar as they are located more for the interests of the animals or the enterprise; b) the licensing as driven by questions for which the answers are pre-established and cooperate with the interest of the enterprise; c) how science production, which allows them to know animals and ecological interactions, is seen as a political strategy for the action of biologists. In this ethnographic experiment, an image is formed that is a non-static and non-totalizing arrangement of practices that make up the biotic environment and that gain effects beyond the margins of the papers.