6 | Insights to address sustainability in assentamentos
In the last chapter, we took steps towards answering our research question. The synthesized results were three clusters of challenges—moving towards sustainable production, building infrastructure for sustainability and creating attractive conditions for the youth—and two elements for the design of solutions—improving access, use and dissemination of sustainability know-how and enabling cooperative collective dynamics. We suggest that those 5 elements should be taken into consideration by policy designers and the most relevant actors involved in Brazil’s process of agrarian reform (i.e. INCRA and MST) when thinking, discussing and planning policies and programs to foster sustainability in agrarian reform communities.
We now intend to go one step further, deriving additional insights that can shed more light on the design of these policies and suggest potential avenues for action. The insights are also meant to provoke useful reflections for the actors mentioned above. We believe that this sort of output—made possible by the methods described in chapter 2— represents an adequate first approximation to devising solutions for a context exhibiting a high degree of wickedness (Rittel & Webber, 1974). When facing this sort of context, “the lack of certainty and the prevalence of ill-defined problems, set against the absence of concrete datasets to back up decision-making, calls for different, more creative and collaborative approaches.” (Siodmok, 2015). The insights we provide here are intended as examples of what these sorts of approaches can achieve, and as input for similar approaches undertaken by others in the future.
>>> 6.1 | The power of example can be an effective means for the transition to more sustainable practices
