Navegar o Xingu, navegar o poder : um estudo autoetnográfico das práticas de consultoria no contexto do licenciamento ambiental da barragem Belo Monte, Amazônia

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of environmental advising practices in the context of the environmental licensing of the Belo Monte dam, located in Volta Grande do rio Xingu, Pará state, Northern region of Brazil. Therefore, I bring up an autoethnographic report of my experience as a field environmental analyst at an environmental advising firm during the years 2010-2013, when I was responsible for carrying out monitoring studies and following up the mitigation measures for the navigation undertaken by the Volta Grande’s riparian population. The objective of the work is to reflect over the challenges faced by the field analysts of an environmental advising company in an institutional culture that seeks to ensure the financial interests of the entrepreneurs, such as the construction of a hydroelectric power plant within the deadline set by the investors to the detriment of the rights of the project-affected-populations. The description of these challenges opened up a broad reflection about power relations in the field of environmental advising practices in Brazil, expressed, for example, in the way through which the effects of a dam (or "impacts", in the consultants' jargon vocabulary) are defined in coherence to the official discourse about the dam´s environmental regulation, which is marked by the underestimation or neglect of its environmental problems. In this work, I argue that the definitions about the effects of the dam are constructed in the interaction between the top managerial entrepreneurial positions and the top managerial environmental advisers. In this context, from an exposition of the hierarchy of positions of the environmental advising firms - in which the top managers and coordinators are those who administer the environmental contracts from the head offices, generally located in large cities of the Southeast region, while the lower analysts are those who carry out the environmental actions in the field, that is, on the construction site of a large enterprise -, I seek to describe how the field analysts move themselves over the social terrain of their organizations and how this movement might (or not) influence the definitions about the dam´s social effects. My interest is to register the movement, in action and in thought, of the field analysts in a highly hierarchical social terrain, and how this movement may (or not) affect the course of their professional trajectories. Hereby, I use the concept of “social navigation”, coined by Henrik Vigh: a concept used to understand how social actors, from a specific social position or condition of power, move themselves within their social formations and how this movement seeks to shape their life circumstances.

This thesis is an ethnography of environmental advising practices in the context of the environmental licensing of the Belo Monte dam, located in Volta Grande do rio Xingu, Pará state, Northern region of Brazil. Therefore, I bring up an autoethnographic report of my experience as a field environmental analyst at an environmental advising firm during the years 2010-2013, when I was responsible for carrying out monitoring studies and following up the mitigation measures for the navigation undertaken by the Volta Grande’s riparian population. The objective of the work is to reflect over the challenges faced by the field analysts of an environmental advising company in an institutional culture that seeks to ensure the financial interests of the entrepreneurs, such as the construction of a hydroelectric power plant within the deadline set by the investors to the detriment of the rights of the project-affected-populations. The description of these challenges opened up a broad reflection about power relations in the field of environmental advising practices in Brazil, expressed, for example, in the way through which the effects of a dam (or "impacts", in the consultants' jargon vocabulary) are defined in coherence to the official discourse about the dam´s environmental regulation, which is marked by the underestimation or neglect of its environmental problems. In this work, I argue that the definitions about the effects of the dam are constructed in the interaction between the top managerial entrepreneurial positions and the top managerial environmental advisers. In this context, from an exposition of the hierarchy of positions of the environmental advising firms - in which the top managers and coordinators are those who administer the environmental contracts from the head offices, generally located in large cities of the Southeast region, while the lower analysts are those who carry out the environmental actions in the field, that is, on the construction site of a large enterprise -, I seek to describe how the field analysts move themselves over the social terrain of their organizations and how this movement might (or not) influence the definitions about the dam´s social effects. My interest is to register the movement, in action and in thought, of the field analysts in a highly hierarchical social terrain, and how this movement may (or not) affect the course of their professional trajectories. Hereby, I use the concept of “social navigation”, coined by Henrik Vigh: a concept used to understand how social actors, from a specific social position or condition of power, move themselves within their social formations and how this movement seeks to shape their life circumstances.