The Public Dispute around the Definition of a Legal Framework for Land Regularization

Abstract

The expansion of agribusiness land claims and their overlap with environmental reserves and traditional territories has been in the public debate since the beginning of the Bolsonaro government. Who has the legitimate right to claim land is one of the central elements in the dispute over narratives around agrarian policy. The paper aims to explain a recent controversy surrounding the change in legislation on land policy promoted by major agribusiness sectors and their legislative representatives. It draws on theoretical and methodological contributions from the field of science and technology social studies and from the field of sociology of critical capacity in order to analyze a public dispute in the Legislative. This approach brings analytical gains insofar as it takes controversy as its object, decentering the explanatory variable from actors and structures. Around the dispute, two heterogeneous articulations were formed that sought to sustain their positions using dimensions such as environmental preservation and justice for small landowners. The work identifies recent strategies for legitimizing the right to approriate land and analyses how they are related to environmental discourses and to the racialization of land access in the form of adevelopment and productivity discourse

land regularization; controversy; Legislative; agribusiness; social movements