Abstract

The Atlantic Forest is a biome that shelters and sustains, with its resources, 70% of the population and 80% of the Brazilian economy. For its biological megadiversity, its vital forest remainders for conservation (8% of the original forest) are considered world heritage, both at regional level, as Natural World Heritage Sites, and at the biome level, as part of the Biosphere Reserve, on the UNESCO Program Man and Biosphere. The restoration of its forests and the sustainability of its domain, with a decent life for its traditional communities, is presented as an utopian project of transnational public interest, which mobilizes agents, institutions and local, regional and international resources in different situations within the Brazilian territory. My doctoral dissertation is structured as action-research in 3 experiments of shared public management, interconnected in 3 different geographical scales: the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact, the proposal for regional sustainability of southernmost Bahia and the implementation of the Monte Pascoal-Pau Brasil Ecological Corridor, on the so-called Sítio do Descobrimento (in English: 'Discovery Site'), where the first encounter between the Portuguese explorers and the indigenous occurred in South America The theoretical effort of this research intends to contribute to the topic viability of these experiments and the strengthening of their emancipator side, facing the their risk of conservationist (and conservative) appropriation. We argue that such a result depends on the consolidation of this trans-scale project as a process of shared public management, but also as a libertarian and anarchist proposal, which would require a differentiated management mode - cooperative, complementary and non-competitive - regarding the applied modes of participatory democracy. The extension of the demodiversity concept, of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to the idea of kratiadiversity could mean, not only a theoretical reconciliation between democratic and republican praxis, double source and target of the libertarian thought, but also the reunion between the latter and one of its matrices - the Amerindian political thought - within its place of origin.

Biographic Note

Paulo Dimas Menezes holds a Master's and Doctoral Degree in Geography by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (2006), Specialized in Contemporary Philosophy (UFMG, 1990), after a Graduate Degree in Architecture (UFMG, 1983). Between 1997 and 2008, he was the Executive Manager of Cidade Institute, that acted on the domains of social mobilization, action-research, regional planning and shared public management for the creation of ecological corridors in the Atlantic Forest of southernmost Bahia. He is an Intern PhD at CES with a grant from CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personnel) – Ministry of Education, Brazil.