Social conflicts and the use of natural resources: brief comments on the theoretical models and research fields

Abstract

The great dissemination of scientific research on environment among the ordinary audience and policy makers led to the vulgarization of the concept of social conflict, which lost explanatory power as a scientific category. Due to the historical characteristics of the scientific and political debate in the area of environment, there are nowadays a great variety of approaches and lines of research that deal with conflict. The present article proposes a brief incursion into the state of the art of studies on social conflict related to the use of natural resources. It seeks to understand, from the point of view of two theories of conflict, namely: conflict transformation and conflict resolution, the patterns and cleavages that characterize recent approaches on social change related to the environment. The article is divided into two parts that expose the theoretical presuppositions of these analytical and conceptual frameworks and their contestation in recent research. The first part of the article consists of a systematization of the two aforementioned theoretical models, and the second part involves an inquiry into the Brazilian scenario of research on this area and its possible developments. In conclusion, some final considerations are traced with reference to the initial proposal of the article. Keywords: Environmental Sociology; social conflicts; use of natural resources; scientific production.