O campo científico e a agroecologia no Brasil: atores, discursos e políticas públicas.

Abstract

The fomentation of agroecological practice occurs through the joint work of a number of people, representatives of discourses and institutions, constituting key-players for understanding the current dynamics of the rural world. Among the three main aspects of agroecology (agricultural practice, social movement and science), this research will focus on its academic-scientific activity. The concern of this thesis is related to the existence’s conditions of a scientific field that institutionalizes agroecology in Brazil, as a specific manifestation of the various discursive and practical strategies that involve agroecology. Knowing this, the general objective is to analyze the national agro-ecological scientific scenario, seeing the networks woven for the construction of this field, its discourses of social transformation, actors and the implications in the construction of policies for the rural world. The methodology consists of a network analysis based on Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (2012), put into practice through the reading of several texts about agroecology, focusing on those that deal with their epistemological and discursive characteristics, and then, in the fieldwork itself, with the realization of semi-structured interviews focusing on the trajectories of the chosen actors and the observation of academic events in the área, given the performative capacity of science, where scientists, researchers, professors and technicians from civil society organizations that dedicate themselves to this theme guide the debate in the construction of an agenda for public policies. This research showed that the institutionalization of agroecology is based on an international network of humans and nonhumans, forming groups of scientists seeking to accumulate capital along their professional trajectories – imbued with ecological, environmental and minority empowerment discourses – to enter the State in favorable political contexts and strengthen initiatives focused on agroecology.