Recursos de uso comum nos Gerais do Jalapão: uma análise institucionalista do termo de compromisso com populações tradicionais no interior de unidades de conservação

Abstract

The Term of Commitment is a law instrument provided with a specific aim by the Decree 4.340/2002, to regulate items of the National System of Conservation Units (NSCU) to temporarily regulate the relationship between traditional communities residing within fully protected conservation units (CUs), which do not allow human settlements nor the direct use of natural resources. As such, it reflects one of the central conflicts to the institution of Biodiversity Conservation: on the one hand, advocates of the modern myth of untouched nature (DIEGUES, 2004) and on the other, of the principle of co-evolution, according to which "all human cultures have changed ecosystems for millennia, while nature simultaneously exerted evolutionary pressures on human biology and social systems" (Colby, 1992, p. 145apud Vieira, 2001, p. 298). In this work, we consider the Term of Commitment as a way for institutional innovation of Biodiversity Conservation, analyzing it through the recent deployment experience of the instrument in the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station (EESGT), Jalapão region, where, along with other CUs, constitutes the largest protected area in the Brazilian Cerrado (ICMBio/JICA, 2011). The conflict posed by the overlap between the fully protected UC and the traditional communities’ territories in Jalapão led these communities to mobilize for recognition of their rights and knowledge. We assume that the major structural axis of the conflict is the traditional fire management for productive activities, which, at the same time, plays an important ecological role, according to local expertise, but that has been considered illegal for many years by environmental agencies. In this sense, we believe that the quilombola identity built by the communities "affected" by CU in the region has a lot more to do with the identification with the ways of living in the gerais, (as the locals refer to large tracts of land with very low population density and abundance of natural resources), than with the reports of slavery. Through the theory of common pool resources (CPR) (OSTROM, 2011), which identifies design principles set out in the organizational arrangements around the community management of natural resources, we seek to reconstruct these ways of living in the gerais before the arrival of the CU through the life history method (PORTELLI, 2001), which consists in rescuing the unofficial history through the filter of memory. We then describe the sequence of collective action (Ostrom, 2010) triggered by the conflict between CU x Jalapão traditional populations, which resulted in the mobilization for the term of commitment, and the EESGT was the only UC to effectively deploy the instrument, and is the reason why it became our case study. The situation of the two communities inside its boundaries will be analyzed comparatively in order to identify the challenges that the Term of commitment raises, once the instrument has been signed by one of the them while in the other, it has been rejected . Finally, an analysis of the text of the agreement signed in light of the principles of design of the RUC long term institutions helps us answer our central question.