ABSTRACT
When faced with the complexities of concrete social and territorial dynamics, technical discussions on ecological and economic zoning (EEZ) applied to Brazil’s Amazon region display the anti-Cartesian anguish of purportedly holistic planning. Allegations of methodological difficulties and of gaps in the “political sustainability” of EEZ display what de Certeau has called “an enormous remainder made up of multiple and fluid cultural systems, located between the ways space is used and planning is done.” Such methodological difficulties express the tension between the geometrized, static and relatively homogenous space of zoning-driven idealizations, and the territory as it is actually used as form-content in a process of change. Contradictions arising from experiences with EEZ in the Amazon region show us that if we take the three moments of its application – pre-understanding the field of action, configuration of the proposed order and social mediation – the domain of political action is not restricted to the moment of final decisions, but rather runs through the entire process. Zoning provokes a reinterpretation of resource rights that runs up against the notion of a consensus supposedly grounded in the “ecological truth of the territory,” as unveiled by the force of practice and by classificatory imagery.
