A nova agenda do Banco Mundial para as áreas de uso comum (1975 – 2011): da “tragédia dos comuns” à internalização da crítica

Abstract

The World Bank Group has dedicated investment projects of intervention in territorial management systems developed by local communities in the so-called “developing countries” to promote “sustainable development” through resource management. The first projects, thought on the perspective of individualization of land and Garrett Hardin’s paradigm of “the tragedy of the commons”, generated conflicts and degradation of land resources, forcing a social perception shift of the planners on alternative institutional arrangements besides private forms. Hence, the common areas, where the territory is governed by community members, are also reviewed in their preconceived condition of “inefficiency and delay”. Instead of Hardin’s, the Bank starts interpreting communal systems evoking economist Elinor Ostrom and neoinstitutionalism, with its emphasis on social function of the communitarian governance forms and the traditional knowledge that is reproduced in them. The research investigated the Bank’s new approach to common areas through related documents. It was concluded that the new orientations aimed to insert areas, actors and their traditional knowledge and practices in circuits of accumulation by stabilizing the formal land market through the officialization and homogenization of communitarian forms of management with the blurring of social tensions by recognizing and transfering property rights. The Bank began to consider thus the incorporation of property regimes, resource use and access to non-private schemes such as communal and traditional communities on those actions designed to increase productivity and reduce poverty.