Cooperation agreements between Brazil and France in the field of rural and environmental sociology: the road to parity
Accords de coopération entre le Brésil et la France dans le domaine de la sociologie rurale et environnementale : le chemin de la parité
Résumé
University cooperation between France and Brazil has been built on bilateral agreements known as Capes-Cofecub. Originally based, from the 1970s onwards, on support from the French government and universities for less well-endowed Brazilian universities, they have gradually evolved towards joint cooperation, with intersecting exchanges of professors and doctoral candidates feeding into joint research programmes. The example proposed here features researchers and academics working on rural and environmental issues. Through agreements that have built a seamless cooperation to date, the path to parity has taken two main thematic directions. First, the question of peasant and family farming, which had been very much debated in France and strongly resonated in Brazil in the 1990s, when it was recognized not only an analytical category but also a category of political and public action. Later on, the issue of agroecology illustrated an achieved parity, as it had been put on the political agenda, due to the decisive role played by the movements, as well as on the scientific agenda, much sooner in Brazil. This reflexive analysis of the trajectory of university cooperation between France and Brazil also shows that it is obviously very sensitive to the turmoil or innovations that are going on in these societies, which are a priori very different, especially around the transition from a productive modernity to an ecological modernity.
La coopération universitaire entre la France et le Brésil a été mise en place dans les années 1970. On suit ici celle qui s’est nouée plus particulièrement dans le domaine de la sociologie rurale et de l’environnement, au travers d’un accord initial entre un laboratoire CNRS de l’Université Paris Nanterre et une université de la Paraíba au Brésil. Au rythme d’accords successifs allant jusqu’à aujourd’hui, le réseau des coopérations s’est étendu aussi bien en France en impliquant en particulier des institutions liées à l’agronomie qu’au Brésil où des universités du Sud ont rejoint la coopération au gré des divers accords. En retraçant une collaboration remarquable par sa continuité, nous montrons comment elle a évolué vers plus de parité entre partenaires et en quoi elle fut en prise avec les courants d’idées irriguant les milieux académiques certes, mais aussi les mouvements sociaux, loin d’être à la traîne de ces derniers.
Origine : Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
