5 | Two domains for the design of solutions to sustainability challenges in assentamentos
The clusters described in the last section synthesize the most salient challenges to fostering sustainability in assentamentos that emerged from our qualitative data analysis. In this section, we will take the first steps to provide an answer for our second ‘broken-down’ research question: Which insights for addressing those challenges may be obtained from existing assentamentos and ecovillages?
First, we would like to highlight that during the process that led to the construction of those clusters, we continuously realized that, although the noted challenges had been and continue to be prevalent in all cases of visited assentamentos, some of them seem to be more successful than others in dealing with them. In particular, interviewees in two of the assentamentos visited —Assentamento Terra Vista and COPAVA/COAPRI—consistently report more effective approaches to confront challenges under the three clusters than interviewees in the other cases. These two communities appear to have adopted agroecological or organic methods of production to a larger and more consistent extent than other cases, and to have higher and apparently more stable levels of income. At the same time, their infrastructure was relatively more developed and, in the case of Terra Vista, partially built with an explicit concern for sustainability. Finally, both cases seemed to be remarkably more capable of attracting and keeping youth than the others.
Although the previous description constitutes a simplified picture of many subtle details that can be gleaned in our qualitative data, our analysis of interviewee responses and observations systematically points to a general hypothesis: capacities to address challenges under the three identified clusters are interlinked. We chose this term to denote that such capacities are not merely correlated, but rather that they work together to more effectively tackle challenges in different clusters at the same time. The capacities that can drive an assentamento to move towards sustainable production, for instance, can also support the development of infrastructure for sustainability and, furthermore, aid in creating attractive conditions for the youth.
In order to capture these “interlinked capacities” in an organized fashion, we once again engaged in a process of interaction with the data, trying to find prominent common elements underlying the variety of practices that represent those capacities in practice. In this attempt, we used the contrast case of ecovillages to strengthen our analysis and obtain further insights, in order to understand how the elements that emerged can support more effective approaches to address sustainability challenges in assentamentos.
The process led us to discover that two key elements present in the relatively more successful cases of assentamentos also play key roles in ecovillages’ approaches to addressing sustainability challenges:
We thus suggest that these two elements should be considered as domains for the design of solutions to foster sustainability in assentamentos. In what follows, we will show how these two elements are represented in our data—in assentamentos and ecovillages—and describe how they could help in addressing the sustainability challenges that we listed above.(i) access, use and dissemination of sustainability know-how, and
(ii) cooperative collective dynamics.
>>> 5.1 | Access, use and dissemination of sustainability know-how