Movimentos das águas e águas em movimento: um estudo sobre os conflitos pela água no Brasil

Abstract

Water is an indispensable element for the continuity of human life and the planet's environmental balance. As a result, the struggle for its access and resources is a struggle that has been going on for centuries around the world. In each space/territory, it takes on specific characteristics, stemming from the existing interrelationships. In Brazil, the existence of multiple conflicts over access, control, and the right to water and its resources can be seen in different spaces/territories, and the consequences of these conflicts take on new contours, whether in terms of defense strategies by social movements or by big capital, as actions that are harmful to these groups. The debates about water and movements can be understood from numerous theoretical and methodological perspectives, but here we start from the conflictuality and the historical and dialectical materiality that actions of different actors leave on different spaces. Once these actions are historical processes, which are in constant movement, acting and materializing in different ways in each space, leaving marks that can be described and analyzed in a critical way. In view of this, we propose to understand the different processes in which disputes over water are embedded, based on scientific debates and analyses of the actions suffered, practiced, and other strategies developed by socio-territorial water movements to safeguard the rights of their members and of society in general. The hypotheses raised in this work are that the socio-territorial movements organize themselves, either internally within a single movement, or allied with others, seeking different ways to face the adversities arising from the conflicts in which they are inserted, such as: demonstrations, occupations of companies and public agencies, lawsuits, against mining, agribusiness, industrial fishing, among others. The debates in this paper sought to understand the different processes in which disputes over water are inserted. In this sense, the bibliometric research and its subsequent analysis provided conditions for the observation of how science has been producing water conflicts worldwide. Not only the forms, but the diverse processes and conceptions that water assumes for each of those who dispute it. In this sense, it was possible to observe the dynamics resulting from the processes of appropriation and differentiation of uses and conceptions of water, noting the existence of hegemonic actors who seek to control it in order to satisfy their needs. The processes related to the disputes for and over water are complex, arising from the sum of factors resulting from the spaces and territories where they are inserted. At the national level, it was noticeable that socio-spatial and socio-territorial movements are important contesting actors of the current order, producing a set of actions and strategies to confront the hydro-hegemonic actors.