Banca de DEFESA: CAROLINE SOUZA DOS SANTOS

CONFLICT TERRITORIES: SPECULATION, IMPLEMENTATION AND CROSSING OF WIND FARMS IN RURAL COMMUNITIES OF SÃO MIGUEL DO GOSTOSOS/RN

wind energy, conflicts, territory, territorialities, symbolic power.

The wind sector has been gaining prominence in the international and national scenarios, widely justified as a mechanism to face environmental and energy crises. At the national level, the State, through the Alternative Sources Incentive Program – PROINFA, in 2002, was responsible for this promotion. Although the media, institutional and business agents claim a positive environmental contribution related, especially, to the low emission of polluting gases and the eventual creation of jobs, the arrival of wind power has engendered a series of conflicts in the territories. In this sense, the literature review shows that the interaction between wind farms and communities has generated disputes that express different forms of meaning and appropriation of space, focusing on its use and the communities' ways of life. Thus, it is important to question what types of conflicts are generated by wind energy and what strategies are triggered in this dispute, starting from an analytical combination between territory, power and conflict associated with an integrating environmental perspective, which does not dissociate the environmental from the social. Therefore, the general objective is to analyze the conflicts generated by wind energy in communities of São Miguel do Gostoso, starting from a territorial and environmental approach in the light of the dimension of power. Analyzing São Miguel do Gostoso proved to be relevant since it is a region with an intense density of installed wind farms and still in the process of building new ventures. For this, a qualitative methodological design was developed, anchored in the content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with community leaders. Through the methodology, the research sought to identify the actors and carry out a typology of the conflict, analyzing the constructed dissent and the coping and/or negotiation strategies put in place by the communities. The results show that the existing conflicts come from the different forms of interaction of the wind sector in the territories, whether in the speculation, implementation or crossing of the wind farms in these communities, so that environmental and territorial dimensions directly linked to the ways of appropriation of the territory, generating power disputes and reconfiguration of local territorialities.