Call for Papers – Thematic Dossier: Environment, territorialities, and social participation

2026-09-23

Organizers: Marcos Cristiano Zucarelli (FJP/GESTA-UFMG); Tânia Guimarães Ribeiro (UFPA); Horácio Antunes de Sant’Ana Júnior (UFMA); Raquel Giffoni (UFF).

Submission deadline: January 29, 2027

Over the past two decades, the Brazilian and Latin American sociopolitical and economic landscape has been marked by intense disputes over the use, appropriation, and preservation of natural resources and territories. The prevalence of economic models based on the expansion of commodities, large-scale infrastructure projects, and extractive activities places significant pressure on environmental regulatory frameworks and formal licensing procedures. The consequences of the expansion of these fronts of exploitation include the intensification of environmental conflicts and recurring disasters, compounded by the advancing climate crisis, which abruptly alter the ways of life of traditional peoples and communities, peasants, and peripheral populations, deepening the social and environmental vulnerability of these groups.

In this context, the State assumes an ambivalent role: on the one hand, it acts as an inducer of neo-developmentalist arrangements and environmental deregulation or flexibilization policies; on the other, it constitutes the institutional arena in which socioterritorial and citizenship rights are claimed. From this tension emerge rituals and arenas of participation, mediation, and governance — often disciplinary, but also appropriated and re-signified by social actors in their efforts to secure their territorialities and identities.

Deepening our understanding of how public policies address environmental issues requires analyzing not only the normative and procedural arrangements of the state apparatus, but also the capacity for resistance and the formulation of alternatives by affected populations. In view of these challenges, the Revista Campo de Públicas: conexões e experiências proposes the Thematic Dossier Environment, Territorialities, and Social Participation and invites researchers, public managers, and activists to submit original works that bring together accumulated reflections in the fields of social sciences and public administration with analyses of territorial dynamics, environmental conflicts, and participatory processes.

With the aim of fostering reflection and establishing a multidisciplinary dialogue on the role of the State and corporations and the actions of social groups in disputes over territories and the protection of their ways of life, this Dossier will welcome articles resulting from empirical or theoretical research, as well as experience reports, addressing the interfaces between the environment, public action, and environmental justice. The central objective is to map the contradictions of contemporary development agendas and to give visibility to new arrangements for participation and struggles for the recognition of socioterritorial rights in Brazil and Latin America.

Among the topics of interest to the Dossier are:

  • State, Regulation, and Environmental Licensing: Analyses of administrative reforms, arrangements for the flexibilization/deregulation of environmental regulations, the role of legal institutions and environmental agencies in licensing processes, as well as the influence of business actors on the formulation and implementation of government policies.

  • Socioterritorial Struggles, Environmental Justice, Environmental Racism, and Human and Nature Rights: Collective action, resistance strategies, mobilizations, and struggles against the social and environmental effects of developmental and neo-extractive projects, as well as struggles for the recognition of rights and territorialities of Indigenous and Quilombola peoples and traditional peoples and communities.

  • Participation, Mediation, and Conflict Management: Analyses of the right to self-determination of traditional peoples and the mechanisms designed to ensure its realization, such as Free, Prior and Informed Consultation and Consent, as well as processes of social participation, including public hearings, consultations, negotiations, and formal and informal governance arenas organized by public or private actors. We also welcome studies examining the limits and effects of these mechanisms on decision-making processes and disputes over territorial resources.

  • Disasters, Climate Crisis, and Institutional Responses: Climate governance and socioenvironmental disasters, state capacity to respond, reparation policies, and their long-term effects on populations and territories. Studies on economic instruments, such as carbon markets, and other corporate initiatives associated with the climate agenda and their sociopolitical effects in the territories where they are implemented.

  • Development Models and Just Transition: Socioenvironmental critiques of neo-developmentalism and the reprimarization of the economy, as well as alternative and sustainable proposals developed by local populations and ontological disputes.

  • Theoretical and Methodological Contributions: Renewed theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of conflicts, political ecology, and social cartography in the field of public policies.