Knowledge Politics in Environmental Conflicts: A Case from Brazil

Following large environmental conflicts and disasters, economic endeavors -particular large-scale investments in mining or hydropower- are nowadays subjected to rigorous environmental law and regulations. The application of rules and regulations takes place in environmental administration and courts and includes environmental impact assessments (EIAs, and does not correspond to the identical English acronym), licensing processes and litigation in court. Within these contexts, decision making is supposed to be based on rational reasoning and purportedly impartial scientific knowledge and information. Thus, citizens’ rights in resource conflicts and the effective enforcement of these rights in administrative, judicial, and political contestation become highly dependent on knowledge and information and the ways it is produced, interpreted, and valued in the interaction between people affected and investors, lays and experts, bureaucrats, legal practitioners and citizens. Political contestation becomes seemingly a technical dispute. This paper bases on a qualitative study of the conflicts surrounding the establishment of the large-scale iron-ore mining project Minas-Rio, in Conceição do Mato Dentro, Minas Gerais, Brazil, conducted in 2014-2015. It describes the problematic nature of the production of information and knowledge in a given political-economic context and the contestations surrounding the validity of apparently scientific results as they emerged alongside the environmental licensing process. Environmental studies and their technical evaluations are based on questionable assumptions and often lack accurate baseline data. The deficiency of public resources for independent investigation makes the environmental agencies dependent on services and information provided by mining companies. Apart from this form of collaboration, the prioritization of allegedly scientific “expert” knowledge, career trajectories of agencies’ personnel, and pressure by pro-mining politicians leads to the uncritical adoption of data, information and knowledge provided by the company and/or the consultancy firms employed by them. At the same time, information given by the people affected and environmentalists becomes sidelined. Thereby, the basic environmental and citizen rights, as the rights to information concerning the environment and to participation in licensing processes, guaranteed in the Brazilian constitution and environmental legislation, become ineffective.