Melo, Juliana

The socio-environmental impacts and conflicts resulting from the implementation of offshore oil and gas industry in Brazilian coastal zone (Walter et al, 2019) are often responsible for creating numerous challenges to the territorial security of artisanal fishery communities (Melo, Tometich, Walter and Umpierre, 2024) and for greater accuracy require a critical lens of socio-environmental impact assessment (Walter, Caldasso and Verly, 2023). Although Brazilian environmental licensing is able to support a certain level of self governance in the context of traditional artisanal fishery communities by setting license conditions such as the implementation of regional environmental programs (24º article of MMA, nº 422, 2011), the public private institutional arrangement is a complex matter in relation to commons management by artisanal fishery communities. Therefore the posed research question is in what measure territorial security instruments can support the maintenance of commons (waters and fish stock) management done by artisanal fishery communities in the past century that have been impacted by offshore oil and gas industry on Brazilian Coastal zone? The methodology used is the case study that according to Yin (2001) allows research into a contemporary phenomenon within its real context, in a situation based on various sources of evidence in an investigation that can benefit from previous theoretical propositions to conduct data collection and analysis. The preliminary results show that strengthening territorial security can address commons management challenges such as water management, but it is not possible to observe the impacts on fish stocks. The final paper intends to consider Ostrom principles of long enduring commons organizations and the territorial securities dimensions in order to provide a better framework analysis for Brazilian environmental licensing public policy.

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.