ENTRE COESÃO E CONFLITO – COALIZÕES SOCIAIS, INSTITUIÇÕES E GOVERNANÇA TERRITORIAL NA FRONTEIRA DE EXPANSÃO DA PRODUÇÃO DE EUCALIPTO NO EXTREMO SUL DA BAHIA

The territorial approach has been adopted in Brazil since the 2000s, however its application still runs under normative bias. In Latin America, the studies about regional development have been seeking to address the relevance of territorial dynamics on understanding the heterogeneity of development styles and the consequences for social cohesion. This perspective emphasizes, among other elements, the weight of the coalitions of dominant social forces on defining the institutions responsible for modulating the access to available resources, which end up directing the ways in which the territory reacts to and absorbs external investments, being them public or private. The present study focus on two action arenas that emerged in the first decade of the 21st century in the territories of Bahia State, named Costa do Descobrimento and Extremo Sul, and how social agents who fight for different goals build new coalitions to manage existing tensions and direct endogenous and exogenous elements towards the local reality, in processes that synthetize the development dynamics. These arenas bring together the cellulose industry – the main vector of transformations towards a concentrated economic growth – and social and environmental movements. More than being an unambiguous reproduction of one side’s interests, the new institutions originated within the arenas reveal advances and barriers on promoting cohesion. The arenas intentionally direct governance actions towards cohesion and partly absorb the demands of the insurgent actors against the hegemonic model. Conversely, the observed transformations represent the limits imposed by historically formed socioeconomic structures, in a long-term process of reproduction of inequalities.