Avaliação de racionalidades do uso da água na agricultura : desenvolvimento de modelos conceituais e de procedimento metodológico em apoio à co/auto-gestão de microbacias

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Marcos Eugênio Pires de Azevedo
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (riUfes)
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/3913
• topic: rationalisation; adaptive management; irrigation; smallholder agriculture; multicriteria analysis; river basin game; Racionalização; Gestão adaptativa; Irrigação; Agricultura familiar; Análise multicriterial; Engenharia sanitária; Processo decisório por critério múltiplo; Gestão ambiental; Recursos hídricos; 628

This work presents the development of an innovative methodological procedure, applicable to real situations which integrates participatory methodology and multicriteria analysis. The adopted participatory methodology was the River Basin Game and the method utilised in the multicriteria analysis was the Weighted Average Method. The problematic that justified this study refers to: (a) a dominant understanding about the rationalisation of the use of water resources in irrigation that represents a partial perspective, essentially underpinned by the need of technological advances and (b) the imbalance in between formal and local water management, in part stemming from the aforementioned problematic, whereas various aspects are related to, amongst them, conceptual constraints of water policies, gap between technical-scientific institutions and society, low levels of society participation in water management. This reality results in the low (or inadequate) implementation of water policies that ends up perpetuating development models based on dominant concepts and, often, excluding society’s most disenfranchised groups. In this sense, the developed methodological procedure was applied in a real situation: the analysis of agricultural water management in the catchment of Sossego creek (Itarana city, Espirito Santo state, Brazil). In this area, smallholder farmers and irrigated agriculture are predominant. It was possible to analyse how the study area is subject to Brazilian formal water policy and faces water scarcity, predominantly due to intensification of and inadequate distribution of water in irrigation. The integration of the adopted tools was rather significant as, amongst other advances, it allowed, richly and significatively, the involvement of different stakeholders with diverse levels and kinds of knowledge (Academy, farmers, public institutions) aiming at the construction of a local model and the gathering of alternatives to the search for solutions to the inadequate water management. Hence, this promoted balance between local and technical knowledges. Furthermore, through the application of the methodological procedure, the dominant idea of rationalisation was corroborated, though there is evidence that new rationalities could be (or have already been) adopted, with the benefits and consolidation of adaptive co-management.