Representantes, ideias e práticas ambientais: um estudo a partir do Conselho Municipal de Meio Ambiente de Fortaleza

Abstract

This research aimed to provide a macrostructural framework of the trajectory of the environment as a public issue, contextualizing each stage, starting from international directives, through the internalization of ideas and practices about participation, technique, and the environment in Brazil and in the state of Ceará, in the form of management councils for public policies, to their operationalization in the form of the Municipal Council of the Environment of Fortaleza (COMAM), taken as a privileged locus of analysis focused on ethnography, aiming to interpret ideas, instruments, and actions fostered in higher spheres and updated in the participatory scene of COMAM. Based on an opposition between legal and institutional texts and the context of political agency, a content analysis was conducted to interpret these materials and their structure of meanings, revealing a system of relations that enables the emptying of environmental and democratic categories by decoding sociopolitical issues and processes into technical terms, pointing to a government's evasion of its socio-environmental responsibilities. These elements were juxtaposed through the systematization of conceptual bases, legal frameworks, and meeting minutes, along with complementary interviews, covering the meetings between 2014 and 2022, the entire legal disposition supporting the Council, and the epistemological pillars that validate statements, instruments, norms, and managerial procedures. Methodologically, the bibliographic research was guided by the hermeneutic perspective of content analysis, which interacts with in-depth evaluation, focusing on trajectories, spatial and temporal contexts, as well as the agency of individuals and institutions, and with political ecology, which focuses on the meanings of actors and differentiations of power and interests regarding the biophysical and social environment, both from an anthropological bias. As a result, it was observed that a set of operational conceptual, moral, and ideological assumptions based on a logic of aligning the environment with the market and the government are materialized in the discourses delivered in the participatory scenes of the plenary, structured in a way to maintain consensus on politically contentious issues decoded into technical terms within a model of manufactured harmony, exemplified in a set of analytical frameworks. It is concluded that the council practice, despite the individual aspirations of the councilors, reverts to the overall framework of the neoliberal-managerialist reference, empirically demonstrating how these terms are naturalized and fostered, generating effects, albeit unintentionally, of political segregation and deliberation on specific, non-structural environmental issues, distant from the proposed humanistic principles.