1 | Introduction
On a warm and dry August morning in Brasilia, we interviewed the former president of INCRA (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária)—the Brazilian government agency in charge of implementing agrarian reform—who declared that the institution under his leadership was going through a learning process centered on “not taking sustainability as an ornament”
Mr. Guedes is a Brazilian bureaucrat from the southernmost Brazilian state, Rio Grande do Sul, the same place where MST—the Landless Rural Workers Movement, a grassroots organization indisputably recognized as a key actor in the Brazilian agrarian reform process—was founded.
The roots of Brazil’s extremely unequal structure of rural landholding trace back to colonial times, when the Portuguese authorities divided the vast territory into large stretches of land and granted control and exploitation rights over them to a relatively small number of wealthy members of the nobility, on a hereditary basis (Faoro, 1958). Since that period, the Brazilian agrarian model has been deeply marked by inequality, environmental degradation and an orientation to commodity production (Furtado & Iglésias, 1959; Prado Jr, 1942). In this context, agrarian reform has been claimed to be the strategy to deal with land inequality and to promote economic and social development in rural Brazil.
In a country that was for centuries ruled by agrarian elites, carrying out agrarian reform has never been an easy enterprise. Agrarian reform has been oscillating in the political agenda in the last five decades and can be considered one of the factors that helped motivate the conservative-military coup d'etat in 1964 (Ondetti, 2008). During the same authoritarian regime, INCRA was created (1970), with the main goal of assisting the state-led territorial expansionism that resulted in the occupation of Brazil’s most distant rural areas. At this point, “hundreds of migrants from various states of Brazil were taken to occupy the margins of the Transamazonica road and companies from various segments received tax incentives to develop large agricultural projects” (INCRA, 2015c).
Today, INCRA’s role has changed and Mr. Guedes’s statement opens up the context of our journey, introducing our main topic of interest: sustainability in agrarian reform. Consensus on a precise definition of ‘sustainability’ is far from being achieved—and perhaps never will be, given the political weight that the concept has acquired in practice (Kates, Parris, & Leiserowitz, 2005). However, given the purposes of our research and for reasons that will be explained in detail further below, we have adopted a broad understanding of ‘sustainability’ not just as a capacity to endure in time, but also to “meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (the so-called Brundtland definition (WCED, 1987)).
The southern region where Mr. Guedes was born witnessed the rise of MST in the 1980s—a period in which Brazil was returning to democracy. This grassroots movement emerged as a national unifier of regional social mobilizations calling for agrarian reform. MST organizes occupations and encampments in unproductive properties that do not "fulfill their social function”, pressuring government to reassign land property rights to underprivileged families. When successful, the result of the political pressure leads to the establishment of assentamentos—i.e., rural settlements resulting from the particular Brazilian process of agrarian reform.
However, being granted the right to land is just the beginning of a longer struggle for assentamentos’ residents—the assentados. After being established, they receive subsidies and credits from the federal government, together with diverse types of support from MST. Both are essential for assentados’ ability to meet their present needs. The question that triggered this research stemmed from a curiosity not just about how this ability occurs at present, but also about the maintenance of assentamentos in time, bringing in the question about the ability of these rural settlements to meet the needs of future generations. It was this concern that brought us to the main question that guides this investigation: how can sustainability in assentamentos be fostered?
In order to provide an answer to this question, we set up a research project under an empirical approach that uses qualitative case studies (Stake, 2005) informed by constructionist grounded-theory data analysis methods (Charmaz, 2014). We attempted to approach the question not just by looking at experiences of different assentamentos, but also by exploring another kind of rural settlement that was chosen as a contrast case: ecovillages. Ecovillages are human settlements intentionally designed and organized with the purpose of achieving social, economical and ecological sustainability. Assentamentos and ecovillages in Brazil and Germany were used as source of ideas and insights to approach the question from different perspectives.
We organized the present narrative in six chapters, including this introduction. Chapter 2 describes and justifies our methods, carefully explaining the approach and the way in which we designed and carried out our research. Chapter 3 provides relevant information about the context in which Brazilian agrarian reform takes place, highlighting the relevance of MST, describing the process by which assentamentos are established, and pinpointing key aspects of ecovillages. Chapter 4 identifies sustainability challenges faced by assentamentos and presents potential elements for the design of solutions. Chapter 5 brings insights to address those challenges, which emerged from our research. Finally, we give an overview of the whole project, highlighting its main contributions and suggesting future avenues for research and policy design.In a nutshell, the main goal of our research was to identify sustainability challenges in assentamentos and provide insights that can shed more light on the design of policies to address them.
>>> 2 | Research design and methods
(if you are not really interested in methods, move to background description directly - chapter 3)