RICARDO DIAS DA SILVA
The institutionalization of the agricultural attaché in Brazil

Date: 26/02/2018

Examination Board: Jorge Osvaldo Romano (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Carlos Roberto Sanchez Milani (UERJ), Ana Elisa Saggioro Garcia (UFRRJ), Geisa Cunha Franco (UFG), and Roberta Rodrigues Marques da Silva (UFF).

Abstract: This study analyses the political debate and institutionalization of the position of agricultural attaché within the Brazilian Foreign Service. With a questioning approach to policy-making that focuses on surrounding actors, we examine the ties and interactions between public and private agricultural sectors as well as the inter-bureaucratic negotiations between the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply (MAPA) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE) regarding this specific policy. After using theory to guide our analysis, we combine different sources such as official documents and in-depth interviews to understand the determining political constraints (for and against) that paved the way to the ratification of Decree 6.464/2008, including the connections and controversies over its implementation and subsequent alterations. In this sense, we explore the analytical yields of the political process that involve and determine the entire policy cycle and are responsible for continued debate about the position of agricultural attaché.

Keywords: agribusiness; agricultural attaché; bureaucracy; Brazilian foreign policy.

VALDÊNIO FREITAS MENESES
Nostalgia and resilience: social reconversions and living with drought among ranchers in Cariri, Paraiba

Date: 21/06/2018

Examination Board: Eli de Fátima Napoleão de Lima (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Regina Bruno (CPDA/UFRRJ), Carmen Silvia Andriolli (CPDA/UFRRJ), Cesar Barreira (UFC), and Luis Henrique Herminio Cunha (UFCG).

Abstract: This research analyzes some movements within strategies for social reconversions among goat ranchers in the region of Cariri, Paraiba, Brazil; these movements include attempts to “change to stay the same” and maintain social status, but transform the material and symbolic heritage of an elite group that runs the risk of losing this status after recent changes in social inequality between the rural and urban worlds of the Brazilian Northeast. The ranchers in the Cariri region share the notion of coexistence with drought in step with political agendas, which starting in the 1970s circulated in the press in large ranching centers across the region. Unlike how other groups, NGOs, and social movements dealt with drought, the ranchers’ version of how they face this challenge sings the praises of large-scale land ownership, painting ranches as the ideal place to learn this skill. This argument was legitimized in the figure of “patriarchs” of families that claim to channel ancestry in this activity, legitimate knowledge, and a natural vocation for raising goats in the dry Northeast. Not only is this a strategy for retaining prestige, but the survival of rural elite ranchers during drought also becomes part of the regional imagination, transforming goats (which not long ago were considered “poor man’s cattle”) into a symbol of the region and in turn granting legitimacy to everything from tourism and food-culture events to rural development policies across the entire semi-arid region of the Northeast.

Keywords: elites; strategies of social reconversions; goat-breeder; drought; Cariri, Paraiba.

FERNANDA DO SOCORRO SANTOS FERREIRA
Land regularization in the Amazon: an analysis of land use planning policies based on the cognitive approach of public policies

Date: 12/07/2018

Examination Board: Sergio Pereira Leite (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Claudia Job Schmitt (CPDA/UFRRJ), Karina Yoshie Martins Kato(CPDA/UFRRJ), Mariana TrottaDallalanaQuintans (UFRJ), and Paulo Roberto Raposo Alentejano (UERJ).

Abstract: Private land appropriation is a hallmark of how the Amazon region was integrated with the remainder of Brazil. At different times throughout this process, various legal instruments were drafted to encourage title regularization of the occupied lands in the region. Nevertheless, land ownership there remained hazy and undefined, making it increasingly difficult to identify and differentiate public lands from private land. Since 2009, Code 11952 (which established an ambitious federal policy for land regularization) has called new attention to this situation and stimulated interest among the academic community with reference to the study of land and spatial policies. This law was meant to simplify and hasten land regularization for approximately 300,000 properties located on public lands in the Legal Amazon region. Here we analyze the ideas that formed the foundation for recent policies on land regulation in this region, based on the cognitive approach in public policy. We also attempt to identify the webs of relationships between the various segments involved in the land status debate, as well as the political forces that were active when the major changes were made to legal and regulatory instruments. The project mainly focuses on the 2003–2016 period, but the complex dimensions and relationships related to land status in this region indicate that in order to understand the “land chaos” in the Amazon and the demand for public intervention to resolve this problem, a deeper exploration of the historical, economic, political, social, and institutional dimensions surrounding other legal amendments related to land regularization is required. The field research involved bibliographic survey, document searches, and semi-structured interviews with various agents (managers and public servants, parliamentarians, leadership from production and union organizations, leaders of non-governmental organizations, legal experts, and researchers specializing in agrarian and land issues). We used a qualitative approached to analyze the information collected, from the comprehensive perspective of Max Weber (2004), since the objective was to understand the reasons behind the social actions of these agents in a specific context and to understand their motivation, the development and effects of these activities, and their contradictions. The analysis shows that one effect of the land management policies applied to the Amazon region since colonial times was overlapping property deeds (legitimate as well as false); demands from different social groups were the most notable outcome. In their attempt to solve current land problems in this region, public policy makers will have to address an extensive and complex past.

Keywords: public policies; cognitive approach; land regularization; Amazon.

VANESSA DE SOUZA HACON
Governing the climate, forests, and indigenous peoples: transnational powers and territory

Date: 04/09/2018

Examination Board: Eli de Fátima Napoleão de Lima (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Thereza Cristina Cardoso Menezes (CPDA/UFRRJ), Carlos Frederico Bernardo Loureiro (UFRJ), João Pacheco de Oliveira Filho (UFRJ), and Henri Acselrad (Ipur/UFRRJ)

Abstract: This thesis investigates the convergence between certain strategies to mitigate climate change and indigenous territorial and environmental management in Latin America which led to government regimes and forms of power over biodiverse ethnic territories and their respective populations. Based on the diffusion of the REDD+ policy, we undertake a multisite ethnography starting from the Suruí Carbon Forest Project implemented with the Paiter Suruí indigenous group who live in the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Land in the Brazilian Amazon. This analysis reveals and describes a system of global environmental governance, establishing connections between politics at the local level and global geopolitics.

Keywords: climate change; indigenous environmental and territorial management; international cooperation.

LAILA THOMAZ SANDRONI
Disputed territories: the Tupinambás de Olivença and biodiversity conservation in southern Bahia’s Atlantic Forest

Date: 02/10/2018

Examination Board: Maria José Teixeira Carneiro (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Claudia Job Schmitt (CPDA/UFRRJ), May Waddington Telles Ribeiro (UFSB), André Dumans Guedes (UFF), Cleyton Henrique Gerhardt (UFRJ), and Edgar De Brito Lyra Netto (PUC-Rio).

Abstract: Biodiversity conservation is currently a prominent concern involving a wide variety of scopes and perspectives on how to achieve this goal. Here we explore some dimensions of the relationship between knowledge and power that interconnect this topic, particularly issues related to the inclusion and exclusion of the populations living in and around protected areas. We use Foucault as a reference to analyze the historical processes involved in constructing these issues, ethnic emergence in the indigenous Northeast, and the struggle for territory in modern rural Brazil, in an attempt to discover links between the ways of legitimizing and expressing discourse and the actions of those involved. Environmental narratives were analyzed in a specific territorial context in order to understand concrete relationships between different contrasting discourses and biodiversity conservation. We particularly address the areas classified as the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Lands and two federal conservation units, the Una Biological Reserve (REBIO UNA), and the Una Wildlife Refuge (REVISUNA). By exploring the creation of these territories in more detail, we gradually expand the scope of their administration. For the indigenous territory, we follow indigenous trajectories to understand how present and past actions were part of the ethic emergence of the Tupinambá de Olivença. For the conservation units, we look for social connections and legitimations that supported the establishment of these protected areas and other conservation activities, notably the role of the Southern Bahia Institute of Socioenvironmental Studies (IESB), a non-profit organization, and its institutional partners in this process. We follow scholarship in the area of political ecology to present causes and solutions that were proposed for the shared problem of environmental destruction of biodiversity through two environmental narratives (“indigenous” vs “environmental”). In examining the indigenous narrative, we investigate aspects related to the ethnic emergence of this group, namely the struggles to demarcate their land, which were central in the construction of practice and discourse related to this narrative. The environmental discourse emphasizes the scientific nature of justifications and forms of legitimizing solutions that resemble those established as a bio-regional paradigm. Although these two narratives were asymmetrical, both challenge dominant perspectives that ignore environmental consciousness with regard to managing land and natural resources, even in different ways and to varying degrees.

Keywords: biodiversity conservation; ethnic emergence; territorialities.

VERUSKA PRADO ALEXANDRE
Integration between agriculture and nutrition as a strategic field of action: analysis from the International Conferences on Nutrition

Date: 07/11/2018

Examination Board: Renato Sergio Maluf (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Claudia Job Schmitt (CPDA/UFRRJ – Coorientadora), Jorge Osvaldo Romano (CPDA/UFRRJ), Karina Kato (CPDA/UFRRJ), Luciene Burlandy Campos de Alcantara (UFF), and Elisabetta Gioconda Iole Giovanna Recine (UnB).

Abstract: This thesis focuses on the emergence of a set of concept and guidelines at the international level intended to integrate agriculture and nutrition, from a scientific point of view as well as in the construction of policies and interventions. This process currently mobilizes a diverse group of actors and institutions, including multilateral organizations, scientific institutions, international non-governmental organizations, social movements, and different segments linked to the business sector, permitting competing visions of potential integration between agriculture and nutrition. The project examines the International Conferences on Nutrition held by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO), together with a broad group of institutions, in 1992 and 2014. We consider these conferences to be mixed arenas in terms of the diversity of participants as well as the dialog they established between different approaches and plans of action that combined scientific and political arguments in order to overcome malnutrition (both malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency and obesity). Using the field theory proposed by Fligstein and McAdam, this project analyzed the interactions between actors linked to agriculture and nutrition as a strategic field of action and focused on the concepts of nutrition that have been emphasized in constructing this field of action. Documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews utilizing content analysis were utilized. The results highlight the role of the FAO as a skilled actor capable of establishing practical and discursive relations between different actors and institutions, with a high level of influence in constructing this new field.

Keywords: Strategic field.

CAMILA CUNHA MORENO
The carbon metric and new colonial equations

Date: 07/12/2018

Examination Board: Eli de Fátima Napoleão de Lima (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Luiz Felipe Brandão Osorio (UFRRJ), Maria Veronica Secreto de Ferreras (UFF), Antonadia Monteiro Borges (UnB), Lia Corrêa de Oliveira Guarino (UFF), and Leonardo Marques (UFF).

Abstract: This study addresses debate on the universalist climate narrative and the premise that the carbon metric is inevitable and irreversible. In the sense that this metric has been a transversal vector for widespread and large-scale political and technological normatization, this normative order involves creating a specific mentality. Applied to territories, the carbon metric creates new property relations and new power equations; this movement relies on the construction of social legitimization and operationalization schemes related to new logics and languages of valuation, as well as the universalization of carbon metrics as a new global abstraction. According to the Anthropocene discourse, the carbon metric serves as a basis for climate universalism with underestimated ideological underpinnings that is an integral part of a political, economic, and technological project: neoliberalism and the digital transformation.

Keywords: digital; climate; financialization; imaginations.

PATRICIA BARROS BRAGA
Monitoring indicators: a socioeconomic portrait of food security in Brazil

Date: 14/12/2018

Examination Board: Georges Gerard Flexor (CPDA/UFRRJ – Supervisor), Fernanda do Socorro Ferreira Senra Antelo (UEMG), Patrícia Verônica Pinheiro Sales Lima (UFC), Joseph David Barroso Vasconcelos de Deus (UFRJ), and Ricardo Jose Braga Amaral de Brito (UFF).

Abstract: To address food security is to address a basic need and right of every human being, involving various areas of knowledge and practice, taking on a multifaceted problem that requires various methods and the involvement of a number of professionals. There are many complex and challenging viewpoints, perceptions, and interests involved in this subject. After Brazil’s (ongoing) food transition process and socioeconomic changes over recent decades, tools must be created to address this issue in order to strengthen understanding of this topic as well as to assist in the implementation, analysis and evaluation of public policies in the sector. This research explored the suggestion for a monitoring index connecting food security in Brazilian households with access to goods and services understood as basic, assuming the hypothesis that “food security can be monitored through basic access to goods and services.” A three-part structure was used; first, the history and concepts of food security and the human right to adequate food were reviewed, and then tools for monitoring and evaluating food and nutritional security in Brazil were analyzed in terms of their objectives, advantages, and disadvantages. We then investigated the indicators used to construct the Basic Food Security Index (ISAB), which has been used in Brazil to monitor food security at the household level, particularly ISAB data for 2013. Multivariate analysis was used to select and justify the most adequate indicators in the ISAB composition, and cluster analysis to describe and analyze the groups. Brazil has major income inequalities and hunger is still a reality; it is essential for food security monitoring to grasp people’s conditions related to food access and use. The socioeconomic viewpoint provided by the ISAB to monitor household food security dimension was seen to be effective, and is important to complement the existing literature on this topic.

Keyword: food security; monitoring indicators; human right to adequate food.