Territórios de conflitos: especulação, implementação e travessia de parques eólicos em comunidades rurais de São Miguel do Gostoso, RN

Abstract

The wind sector has been gaining prominence on the international and national scenes, being widely justified as a mechanism for tackling environmental and energy crises. At a national level, the State, through the Alternative Sources Incentive Program – PROINFA, in 2002, was responsible for promoting the wind sector in the country. Even though 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 farms 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, affecting its use and the communities' ways of life. Therefore, it is important to question what types of conflicts are generated by wind energy and what strategies are used in this dispute, based on an analytical combination between territory, power and conflict associated with an integrative environmental perspective, which does not dissociate the environmental from the social. Given this, the general objective is to analyze the conflicts generated by wind energy in communities in São Miguel do Gostoso, starting from a territorial and environmental approach in 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 wind farms installed and still in the process of building new projects. To this end, 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 create a typology of the conflict, analyzing the disagreements constructed and the coping and/or negotiation strategies used by the communities. The results show that the existing conflicts arise from the different forms of interaction of the wind sector in the territories, whether in the speculation phase, implementation or in the crossing of wind farms in these communities, so that environmental and territorial dimensions directly linked to the forms of of appropriation of territory, generating power disputes and reconfiguration of local territorialities.