Desenvolvimento como liberdade em realidades assentadas: uma avaliação das políticas públicas dos assentamentos rurais de Russas-CE

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the effectiveness of structural and complementary public policies in rural settlements in Russas-CE, in order to contribute to the material and symbolic reproduction of the beneficiaries in the light of Sen’s theory of development as freedom. Thus, we intend to analyze how government actions in the three levels of public administration can contribute to the removal of the existing forms of deprivation in these refurbished units to ensure the capacities expansion of those surveyed settlers. We wanted to unravel if the agrarian reform policy of rural settlements is configured as a creation of a slum in the countryside or a promotion policy for landless farmers, according to the theoretical clash of contemporary rural studies. As a method of analysis of the effectiveness of these actions, we decided to segment our study object according to the stages of agrarian reform program implementation, according to the classification of Incra, dividing these settlements into three realities : 'Creation', 'Structuring' and 'Consolidation'. The survey was conducted in nine rural settlements, with the application of seventy-five questionnaires, which corresponds to a non-probabilistic sample of fifty percent of the total population studied, through visits in all settlements. In addition, we used conversations with local leaderships, with militants from social movements, and simple observation. Also in the collection of materials, we used a documental research, through the meeting minutes and the development plans of the referred researched settlements. It can be pointed out in the results that there are different levels of effectiveness achieved for each one of the analyzed groups, with some uniformity in the effectiveness related to the complementary policies in the different realities studied. On the other hand, in structuring actions, we registered discrepancies accentuated for the 'Creation' group in comparison to the other realities, because the first ones are most likely to experience states of privations due to the lack of installation credits, shortage of water in the last four years, the reliance only on the social programs income, proper to the fact that the vast majority does not have members of the family group working in non-agricultural activities – multiactive families -, and not retired. Even before all this scenario, we can observe in the great majority of interviewers that they declared themselves in welfare conditions over the previous period to the settlement. In that way, we conclude that the agrarian reform program, even given the limitations of management and implementation, still represents one of a asymmetry repair instrument to the rural population, enabling not only the beneficiaries material reproduction, but also the symbolic one.