França Filho, Genauto

The context of the organizations of seeds and their management possibilities in Brazilian civil society as well as their governance in a state government level through public management can be assessed by the lens of a typology categorizing them according to their purpose: commercialization, sustaining community life, ecological restoration and exploitation of intellectual property. The objective of this work is to focus on two types of organization of seeds: (1) the one that is focused on commercialization and is done by cooperatives linked to rural social movements in south Brazil; (2) and the one that aims community life sustainability and is done by associations from northeast Brazil. In order to define a theoretical framework the contributions of Olson (2002), Ostrom (1990), Ricoveri (2012), Shiva (1997), Dardot and Laval (2017) and Federici (2022) were considered. To meet the purpose of the paper, a qualitative methodology was chosen with the empirical investigation strategy of the case study. According to Yin (2001), the case study allows a contemporary phenomenon to be researched within its real context. Therefore we have done 35 interviews in four different communities and organizations that will be analyzed following the Bardin (2011) perspective and data categorization and interpretation will be mediated by NVivo software. By looking both at the concrete case studies and at legislation in the Brazilian context as well the preliminary results suggests that rural communities have managed the governance of the commons towards their seeds over the past few decades, despite the challenges of legislation, transgenic contamination and incentives to turn plant DNA into private intellectual property. This is a key theme for just food systems as well as for the current context of climate change and the Anthropocene.