Environmental impact studies and the development visibility economy

Abstract

The development of large infrastructure projects is encouraged and justified through the development rhetoric, a category that produces meaning effects that attribute an inexorability to projects in the face of market "demands". Nonetheless, although dealt with under the heading of impacts in an environmental licensing context for major works, the production of various forms of violence, and expropriation in particular, is inherent to these projects. Based on field research assessing the affectation policies caused by two dams in the Jequitinhonha Valley and an environmental impact assessment analysis (EIA-RIMA) for a mining complex in the Santo Antonio river basin, located in the Rio Doce sub-basin, Minas Gerais, this article addresses the limits and implications of the categories traditionally mobilized in Environmental Impact Assessments. We discuss the visibility economy produced in the licensing context and how it eliminates the multiplicity of compulsory displacements and the routine violence within the scope of technical impact management.