Trajetórias de saber, discursos de poder: o Aquífero Guarani na agenda ambiental contemporânea

Abstract

The general aim of this thesis is define and analyze the context of construction of contemporary environmental agenda of groundwater ressources at the global and local levels. The groundwater remained laid aside to the debates and concerns about water ressources management until the 2000s, When, from then on, a group of multilateral institutions, international organizations and scientists made efforts to develop the first multilateral management Project in Latin America. In this case, the Guarani Aquifer System, which crosses Argentina, Brazil, Paraguai and Uruguay, was the focus of analysis and received support from the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank and the Organization of American States for the elaboration of Environmental Protection and Integrated Sustainable Management of the Guarani Aquifer System Project (also known as the Guarani Aquifer System Project – PSAG). As a result, the municipality of Ribeirão Preto (SP), as well as its Administrative Region, gains centrality by being selected as the locus of analisys of the PSAG by reason of critical and confliction relationship with waters and land surrounding the aquifer. Inserted in this conjuncture, this thesis associates and transits through these two dimensions – global and local – seeking to apprehend the discourses, knowledge and actors that exert a kind of pressure in the construction of new mechanisms of environmental management of groundwater. Among the results, it was possible to verify at the global and local level the prominence of the technical-scientific discourse in the environmental debate, placing itself as primordial and necessary knowledge for the management of underground resources. In interface, a set of knowledge that distances itself from scientific rationality is annulled, since it does not have the legitimate repertoire to deal with this theme. The discourses mobilizes by certain agentes operate, therefore, as a regime os truth, exercisin a practice of exclusion of knowledge by establishing a true discourse about water management. Also, by making use of a discourse authorized, which is accepted by everyone in the political field, a specific way of understanding groundwater and the management is marked. This monopoly of legitimate knowledge is demonstrated through the reconstruction of the academic and professional PSAG participants’s trajectories and the reformulation of the statements developed by the technical institutions participating in the debate. In addition, this thesis reveals how this technifield knowledge will be used strategically by diferents actors and economic agents that aim at the implementation of global and local regulations and the appropriation of natural resources, which, after all, go beyond the limits of water and reach the explotation of the land. Specifically at the local level, the participation and analysis of discourses in the participatory arenas of water and land management allowed us to understand such complexities. Finally, we defend the hypothesis that the truths about the aquifer are constructed and disputed discursively. And, in this process of dispute, the consolidation of management instruments on groundwater envolve a set of agents that strategically mobilize knowledge and discourses capable of producing reflections in the field of naming the environmental theme and actions in the instances of environmental management.