Environmental inequality pattern on island Algodoal-Maiandeua: a Q methodological case study

Abstract

Regulations to protect Brazil's rainforest have moved in recent years from broad global development strategies to certain consideration of local specifics. One expression for this change is the upcoming term of environmental justice as new paradigm in politics and social sciences. In opposite to the sustainable development concept, environmental justice emerged on the basement of municipality and therefore highlights social and cultural questions more than sustainable development does. In the present case study, existing discourses on an environmental protected island in Brazil's Amazon has been used as an example to discover discourses of environmental inequality pattern. Due to the fact, that environmental legislature on the island still fails to answer this problem set and pressing social problems remain, main discourse differences are assumed to have it in it to reveal most pressing unresolved issues as perceived by the involved stakeholders. Q Methodology and free unstructured participant observation have been used within the frame of Elvers’s process related research paradigm to survey traceable and comparable data of environmental problem perception. This tool could provide evidence for three main problems that could be outlined as main causes of environmental inequality in the field: Instead of waste problems, power inequality of migrants versus native population on the island and distance related knowledge divide emerging in the shape of cultural and educational differences, both framed by a landownership pattern created by illegal land purchase. As consequence, misdirection of institutional agents, failure of a development plan and low activity of local (native) civil society lead to failure of well- intended environmental legislature.