XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Living Alongside: Activism, Agency, and Infrastructure Development in a Hotspot of Cultural and Biodiversity—Southern Bahia Brazil

• In Event: (Un)Sustainable Development and its Representations

Abstract

With some of the last remaining intact Atlantic Forest, Southern Bahia, Brazil has long been a global biodiversity “hotspot” as well region with a rich historical and cultural heritage. But today Southern Bahia is also known for something else—a large-scale railroad and port development project, called Porto Sul, which makes it the site of one of the largest infrastructure development projects in Brazil as well as Latin America. While Porto Sul will have undeniable impacts on the flora and fauna of this region, it is currently calling into question the ways in which the people who live in this region are resisting, aligning, and grappling with their rootedness in place, when their place is unequivocally changing.

This paper examines forms of activism that confront and collaborate with the Porto Sul project. From social-environmental leaders trying to stop the project, despite its approval and initial development progress, to new initiatives intended to monitor the project and promote transparency, accountability, and mitigation strategies for negative social-environmental impacts, the paper overlays the ways in which specific leaders—including social-environmental activists, family farmers, quilombolas, and nativos—mobilize identity and agency in the face of a massive development project. The paper furthers the findings of a recently published monograph, Running After Paradise: Hope, Survival, and Activism in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest (University of Arizona Press 2022, available in English and in Portuguese in Spring 2024), and also engages with broader debates on development, activism, and progress in contested regions of Brazil and beyond.

Author

• Colleen Scanlan Lyons, University of Colorado Boulder