Arena pública, dominação e resistência em um território amazônico: o fórum de desenvolvimento sustentável das ilhas de Belém-PA (2006-2020)

Abstract

This study discusses the way in which island riverside communities in the cities of Belém and Acará, state of Pará-Brazil, mobilized and participated in the Public Arena / Forum of Sustainable Development of the Islands, to claim their rights regarding health, education, sanitation, water supply, public security, electric / solar energy, income generation and overcome its invisibility. To analyze this problem, was adopted as a framework for analysis the sociological approach to collective action by Daniel Cefaï, Veiga and Mota (2011), which privileges the local situations that are at the origin of the constitution of public arenas. The study requires a descriptive qualitative approach in which the collection of information / data was carried out through informal conversation; participant observation in events such as: meetings, deliveries of food baskets, toys and school supplies, visits and collective initiatives; documents research (project, plans, reports and meeting minutes); and open interviews with active people from the island riverside communities, the government, religious institutions, NGOs of research and extension. The results indicate that in a territorial context historically marked by clientelistic socio-political relations, it is reasonable to consider this experience of participation and mobilization as an important event, which constitutes political education, with the necessary learning towards the inclusion of this subordinated segment in the decision-making process regarding public policies of their interest. This mobilization benefited from the essential support of technicians from public agencies, specialists from universities and politicians from the progressive field to encourage the complaint against injustices inherited from colonization, maintained and updated by the domination system, with perverse effects impregnated in the set of relations with the active people of the local power system - what is called coloniality. The mobilization faced resistance from a certain conception that it sees as island riverside communities as backward and doomed to disappear. The strategies of the riverside people have contributed to the politicization of local challenges, but have been limited by several elements, such as the absence of an innovative legal apparatus, disregard for the unequal conditions of participation, the use of inadequate methodologies, the lack of appreciation of the work of translators / mediators, the lack of recognition of the subject's diversity of ontologies, an incomprehension of the different cosmologies and epistemologies, factors that worked as barriers to mobilize and also question the traditional domination system on which local power is based.