By RICARDO NEDER*
The solidarity economy is an area of growing study within the framework of international experiences to address the search for concrete solutions and alternatives to exclusionary neoliberalism.
Introduction
The political economy of relations between the State and civil society in the face of the emergence of the popular public sphere is currently an unfinished construction, as it involves the political mobilization of public resources to guarantee the permanence of a financing system in the long term (decades) as support for coalitions of networks between social movements and political cadres, universities and government policy managers, to create the financial, educational and scientific-technological support that attracts the heterogeneity of the layer of popular productive organizations.
This layer is currently formed by a variety of local and ethnic styles and characteristics, under gender relations in family and neighborhood collectives for associated work, popular cooperatives, production-consumption-marketing networks, financial institutions focused on popular solidarity enterprises, companies recovered by workers organized in self-management, family farming cooperatives, service provision cooperatives, local associations, fairs and family collectives, among others. This diversity requires that a multilevel format be designed in the future (at the three levels of government and the various audiences involved) to achieve governance and control criteria, combined with the evaluation of effectiveness.
In the recent past (2000-2020), university incubators, social movements and civil society organizations have pursued the strategy of a network of networks coalition (connecting to a significant number of networks through a network). This was the case of the Social Technology Network RTS. It assumed the identity of a national forum in defense of investments in S&T based on sociotechnical principles. (Its management board included ten public and government entities, as well as representatives of the solidarity economy and university incubators of popular cooperatives).
Together with civil and governmental entities, they created the possibility of creating their own credit system, headed by the Community Development Bank, the Palmas Institute. The political division of labor was marked not so much by the public opposition versus private, but between the sphere of public-private partnerships (in which forms of State capture are present) and the public-community sphere in the societal aspect (in this case, the selectivity of entities, associations and movements in their struggle to access more resources is at stake).
The solidarity economy is an area of growing study within the framework of international experiences to address this search for concrete solutions and alternatives to the fact that neoliberalism excludes sustained programs to generate salaried jobs (temporary or otherwise) for the 80 million people who currently make up the working-age population in the popular circuits of the economy in Brazil. This surplus of labor force is both a structural characteristic of capitalism to maintain an industrial reserve army as part of the wage system to maintain control or subordination of the labor force, and a striking feature to reproduce a labor market that lowers wages and remunerations as a general rule.
The contingents excluded from the wage market of 80 million people (2022 Census) are nothing exceptional under capitalism, although it is unsustainable both because it generates the annihilation of people of all ages without them having the chance of a civilized life, and because of the exclusion of working social groups and urban and rural popular classes in situations of social and economic separation. They react and mobilize to overcome the forms of exclusion from the formal market of the economy.
The transfer of resources within the scope of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policies
The reform of the State remains incomplete. Constitutionally demarcated in 1988 with the current Magna Carta and initiated in the first Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (1994-98), it is far from creating new forms of control and monitoring, governance and controllability to encompass solidarity-based economic enterprises or their generic form of popular productive organization (EES/OPP). In this way, such reform could provide legal, fiscal, budgetary and legislative security at the three levels of government to encompass the transfer of resources for the social demands of these social groups that correspond to 60% of local markets not recognized by typically capitalist market circuits.
This reform will expand the concept of market to other types of market (solidarity, indigenous, sociocultural, ethnic, extractive, family farming, conservation and protection of biodiversity), in an effort that has not yet been recognized as legally and constitutionally founded in administrative law by public agents in Brazilian courts and government agencies.
In view of this, it is essential to develop a new method of producing administrative law in the country to also consider these transfers and investments as legitimate. Following the example of the Brazilian Innovation Law, under which public transfers for research and development are authorized under the Brazilian Technological Innovation Law (LIT – No. 10.973/2004), society needs to legitimize a legal-normative basis for transfers of Science, Technology and Society. The LIT provides incentives for the business environment circuit of technological innovation, in the formal capitalist market. For this reason, it is a short blanket.
A large part of the scientific community supports the thesis that the origin of the transfer of resources for S&T in Brazil is the public policies of science & technology, associated with the funds for formal education and professional and technological education of the national network that is currently expanding.
To begin, let us return to the basic observation mentioned above: the field of public and private policies and actions in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) currently has a framework regulated by the Brazilian Technological Innovation Law (LIT according to Law 10.973, 2/12/2004), which provides for the transfer of resources via innovation and scientific and technological research to the business environment. The Brazilian Innovation Law policy pays for companies to employ masters and doctors to work on specific research and development (R&D) projects. The Brazilian Innovation Law affirms the primacy of the principle of transferring public resources to increase business productivity. Doctrinally, it states that this is how society will receive the benefits resulting from research and technological development; as entrepreneurs innovate, they will be able to increase their profitability, because they will be obliged to transfer more and better goods and services to society.
This is considered the best way to introduce society to science and technology. However, the fact that Brazilian companies absorb less than 1% of the masters and doctors who graduate each year from universities leads us to conclude that these professionals will later work in roles that have nothing to do with research and development. According to some researchers of Brazilian science and technology policy, the problem of the inadequacy of the development policy (unidirectional for business innovation) has its roots in this behavior of entrepreneurs and cannot be attributed to the lack of government resources and instruments.
According to Renato Dagnino, “(the entrepreneur) is economically rational in the face of what he perceives as market conditions” (DAGNINO, op. cit.). These refer to our condition as an economy that is sometimes semi-peripheral and industrialized in the production of manufactured goods, and sometimes peripheral, acting as a platform for the export of biomass and biodiversity in the form of food and raw materials.
The scientific and technological policy for fostering innovation therefore tends to be strongly linked to the unequal dynamics of market processes in intercapitalist competition between large business blocs, or corporations. Compared to them, the micro and small business segments do not need research and development. (Whether or not they can resort to R&D is a dilemma that can only be resolved by offering the possibility of doing so. But escaping the economic determinism of the markets is not something that can be created by the law of innovation, since it concretely polarizes the large capitalist circuits and imprisons the rest of society).
We are faced with a basic observation: as practiced in relation to the Brazilian Innovation Law for entrepreneurs, specific and differentiated legislation is also justified for social technology and socio-technical adaptation adjusted to the solidarity economy (NEDER, 2009, PARACA, 2009).
This requires the State to create and launch protection networks for circuits of solidarity-based economic enterprises in which work and information, societal management and social technology can increase the formative experience of social groups and subjects in associative management of production and generation of innovations (CATTANI, 2003, SINGER, 2002).
Resource transfer in the field of Science & Social Technology Policies
In the recent past (2004-2020), a broad configuration of networks of networks was woven with movements that demanded the redefinition of the relations between universities and science and technology policy to reach the base of the social pyramid (among others, in the context of Reuni I and Reuni II, quota policies, and a review of science and technology policy for social technology). This redefinition has justified in recent years a broad mobilization of public opinion for the systematic dissemination of actions, experiences, policies, research and concepts around social technology as the distinct policy model of the LIT.
These actions included a Social Technology Network (RTS) with 660 entities, the annual social technology awards from the Banco do Brasil Foundation and, above all, the promotion actions of the Study and Project Financing Agency (Finep/MCT) for social innovation environments in 88 Popular Cooperative Incubators at public universities in the country, in addition to the networks of solidarity economic enterprises and the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Program (MTE).
For the first time in the country, in the period 2004-2016, a Secretariat of Science and Technology for Development and Social Inclusion (Secis/MCT) was created. The Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA), the Ministry of Social Development (MDS), the National Secretariat of Solidarity Economy – Senaes and the national Sebrae are development agents that have promoted calls for funding projects on social technologies from the research community in the country.
From 2004 to 2016, this construction was strengthened by the installation of 44 community development banks in the country, a network that makes microfinance a weapon against the isolation of community incubation experiences (2010). Around R$1 billion was invested in the social technology movement (considering the R$500 million in the last four years, according to data from RTS, FBB, MCT and universities, and the same amount from parliamentary amendments in the Local Productive Arrangements programs, from Secis/MCT).
The wealth of experience and knowledge is significant in terms of projects, actors and, above all, learning accumulated on a real scale. Among them are the experiences of popular participation in the Solidarity Economy and ways of linking production and social action, the Pais model of family horticulture for food and nutritional security, and the plate cistern program of the Articulação do Semiárido (ASA).
There are theses and dissertations already defended analyzing the conditions and bases of management by local and community organizational networks on Social Technology; and there will be many others, as there are at least a thousand known cases available (involving five hundred cases from the FBB Awards and the rest from the RTS Experience Bank, available on the internet).
Management by networks of local and community organizations is documented between 2000 and 2016 and is part of reality, despite the discontinuation of public policies to institutionalize disciplines, science teaching approaches and public policies and research centers in the S&TS field.
The basis for the university to combine science & technology with popular wisdom are the Latin American STS (Science, Technology, Society) Studies and the Brazilian research on AST – sociotechnical adequacy, which means scientific and popular knowledge sharing their technical codes. This dimension is key to ensuring the conditions for evaluating results from which institutional, legal and societal management conditions will be created (in addition to indispensable but far from sufficient management practices – cf. THIOLLENT, 2005).
There will be an improvement in the legal, credit, fiscal and tax framework for the solidarity economy, when the issue of the subject as a bearer of knowledge is assimilated by public administration and governments as decisive as part of the popular participation with which technicians and researchers must exercise dialogue.
Within this movement, technological culture has been treated as a process of sociotechnical adaptation (AST), according to the theoretical basis developed by the movement for social technology, initially formulated based on the collective work of Brazilian researcher Renato Dagnino (2009, 2008, 2007, 2004).
Achieving a scale of learning and training is at the forefront of the efforts of this theoretical basis at a strategic point: social agents can have more autonomy for self-organization through methods appropriate to the cultural and symbolic territory where the people involved live, with a specific technological culture.[I] This may be the cognitive criterion to give legitimacy to multilevel governance, understood as the search for protection of fourth-generation rights that involve tacit knowledge and knowledge as intangible intellectual rights of the cultural base (chapter V in this specific volume deals with this topic).
In this first sense, technology cannot be separated from the social subject that gives rise to it (as is the case, for example, of recovered factories, of producing families in family farming, in extractive communities; of collectives in agrarian reform settlements, of popular cooperatives in favelas in large cities; of associations of riverside peoples and the population of the semi-arid region, or even of associations that bring together women who break babassu palms in the Northeast and, to a maximum extent, in the community economy of indigenous peoples and traditional populations that dominate local and regional production chains (MELLO et al., 2009).
Public and community bank funding is directed at this field of interaction: the social subject that adapts, based on popular know-how. Since they interact little with technical and scientific agents and extension workers, when this experience occurs it is marked by the uncertainty of the entire experience.
If the scientific technical subject is someone with a mind formed under the STI mentality, he will see in sociotechnical practices and popular tacit technologies a kind of key to unlock “artifacts with market value”.[ii] (In this aspect, popular participation is denied or left aside because the technical language adopted has no resonance or meaning for the popular culture involved; cf. FREIRE, 1997).
In this case there will be a strong managerial bias distorting implicit knowledge, or tacit technology systematized to be incorporated into the typically capitalist business model as an innovation, which will certainly benefit a few.
To deconstruct the logic of the innovationist approach when faced with OPPs (since they constantly experience the conflict between the co-optation of official or unofficial bodies and the search for collective community autonomy), it is worth remembering that it generally attributes to actors who carry practices endowed with implicit knowledge or tacit technologies the abstract form of a methodology, product or concrete process taken from the community. This basis is systematized and converted into a solution or model for solutions (for example, income generation). This transposition has been practiced as technological diffusionism.
The concept of technological diffusion thus has three typical dimensions: i) the agents are modeled according to the idea that every enterprise follows the logic of exchanges based on generating profit under a management model, based on the methodologies of Sebrae (Brazilian Support Service for Micro and Small Businesses); ii) it involves extracting implicit knowledge and tacit technology from social practices; iii) it involves manualizing (creating manuals) and removing them from their community context, to convert them into a business model to be linked to some chain of commercialization of products and services, aiming at results for capital.
The methodology in the C&TS aspect, on the other hand, is more expensive financially and in terms of evaluation (accountability) more difficult, since qualitative methodologies for evaluating results for the popular base are more expensive in terms of generating TOR – work, occupation and income. Multilevel governance applied to this complexity requires results indicators both in the scope of microprojects (short-term tactics) and in long-term local action programs (LAP).
In this environment, there is a similar problem (to that of diffusionism) that is difficult to escape: multiplier agents (extensionists) are tempted to justify the implementation of good practices with concrete examples that are more linked to devices than to the practices and multilevel relationships that the processes of emancipation and autonomy allow for the subjects involved. They often become technologies-without-subjects. In this case, although the technology was born from an experience or research among specific social subjects, the starting point is an attempt to reapply the model on a larger scale, taking advantage of the intrinsic qualities of some social technology device.
Multilevel governance, on the other hand, is linked to qualities and attributes, that is, to the development of capabilities (cognitive, social, commercial, productive skills, etc.). This capacity development is capable of recreating environments with collectives that know how to navigate institutions, mobilize resources and acquire social skills to negotiate and compete with other IRA actors (Institutions, Resources and Actors).
This complex – IRA – represents the great difference for all experiences involving social technology. The paradigm is the Brazilian program for the construction of closed cisterns (made of iron-cement plates) to store rainwater based on solutions that expand their learning scale through an IRA-type arrangement or environment for thousands of small family farmers in the Brazilian semiarid region. The solution sought was to mobilize agents and enabling environments in collaborative projects and networks (MANCE, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2003 A).
As a sign, product or object that easily integrates other reapplication circuits, the social technology of the plate cistern (and other TSs) has been a tail efficient in attracting other knowledge and skills, and facilitating technical mediators in developing methods capable of achieving the conditions for recreating the institutional, societal and cultural environment specific to the targeted territory.[iii] In other words, social technology operates as a glue, but once social subjects have engaged, they must be able to free themselves from this glue (detach from the experience) and consider their own unique conditions for rooting. This is what we call sociotechnical change.
Strategic dimensions of government public financing of a S&T policy for OPPs
The S&T model focused on technological innovation by companies is the result of official support policies. For it to be replaced by another model financed by corporate sources, state investments will have to be gradually replaced by corporate investment resources, as is an international trend (almost 70% of total R&D investments are currently covered by private sources in the US; cf. De NEGRI, 2022).[iv]
On the positive side, today, there are new links with Science & Social Technology in universities through local and territorial initiatives. They seek to implement policy experiences in areas such as from software free, digital media in education and professional training for professional development, socio-technical projects for sustainability in municipalities regarding water resources, affordable housing, energy, transportation, environment, health and public sanitation, science, culture and arts workshops in municipalities. Among the latter, experiences of direct reappropriation of the cultural industry (cinema and video, photography) are relevant.
Special financial, credit, fiscal and tax incentive policies will be needed to mobilize millions of people within the popular circuits of the economy (including people from consumer classes B, C and D) to: (i) Identify the agglomerations and clusters that gave rise to popular productive organizations and EES, with the incorporation of TS (social technology or technological culture). (ii) Mapping and statistics on the territorial and socioeconomic configuration – taxonomy of popular productive organizations and EESs with different types of social technology and local networks of production, services and sociotechnical assistance with the qualification of local multidisciplinary agents.
(iii) Mapping of collective experiences with popular productive organizations and social technology in local networks of relevant experiences in the identified OPPs/EESs, with the systematization of information related to government expenditures, capital flows and investments destined for popular circuits; (iv) Identification and systematization of actions developed in the context of the private sector and its representative entities that can establish a disjunctive or conjunctive in the face of OPP convergence.
Conclusions: four challenges
The strategic dimension to be taken into account in regulating the sector of popular production organizations (as indicated by research and extension) is the S&T policy for the links between service and production chains. Small and medium-sized companies join together in two types of networks: (i) corporate networks, formed around the activities of a parent company (generally a large corporate company) in which the subcontracted companies have little autonomy and decision-making power; and (ii) flexible networks, in which companies of generally similar size can join together through a consortium that gives flexibility to the network, in addition to greater autonomy to the participating companies (METELLO, 2007, ARAÚJO, 2005).
The OPPs follow the second path of flexible networks with the linkage between associates and solidarity cooperatives. Some advantages of these associations are highlighted in the literature, such as: reduction of fixed costs, mainly with regard to technological development research; use of the critical mass of other companies; risk sharing; increase in collegial purchasing power; shared training and qualification for quality; increase in the diversity of products offered (TAULLE, 2008, 2004; DAGNINO, 2004; METELLO, 2007, ARAÚJO, 2005).
These advantages are largely due to the work provided by the networks to each of the participating companies. Considering the reality of solidarity networks, the economic factor is also present as an important benefit to be achieved by the participating EESs, but other positive points of this association, non-economic, are also highlighted, such as, for example, the reduction of the risk of co-optation and the distortion of alternative projects (CATTANI, 2003, DOWBOR, 2007).
Solidarity production chains (CPS) are networks formed by popular production organizations/EESs, articulated in the same production chain, whose activities make up the main links of this production. In this way, the commercial relations established by each EES can be consistent with the internal logic of cooperation, since the other links in the chain also operate under the same principles. With the increase in exchanges between EESs, the need for commercial relations with conventional capitalist companies decreases and, with this, the need for competition in the market (EID and PIMENTEL, 2005).
From there, another logic of relationship between enterprises may emerge. There is also a third axis of research and extension for the construction of a typology of obstacles to the convergence between S&TS and EES. It concerns the difficulty in marketing products, the impossibility of accessing the credit system and the lack of technical assistance (ARAÚJO, 2005). Other difficulties faced by EESs concern the low level of education of partners and the lack of habit of democratic practices in production systems (according to the National Information System on Solidarity Economy – Sies, of the Ministry of Labor and Employment in the 2004-2016 period).
In order to reach a conclusion in this regard, more in-depth research was carried out on the advantages offered by network association – or by the articulation of a CPS or solidarity-based production chain – to discover to what extent they contribute to solving the problems faced above by solidarity-based economic enterprises and the prospects for these difficulties being addressed by increasing technological culture in various solidarity-based or non-solidary production chains (HAGUENAUER, 2001; LIANZA and ADDOR, 2005, KELLER, 2002, 2004, 2005; MERTELLO, 2007; RUTKOWSKI, 2005; TAUILLE et al., 2002, 2004).
Given the above scenario, the S&T movement for social technology faces structural challenges for civil society to recognize the solidarity economy and the sociotechnical movement. As in the case of transitional justice for violated human rights, aiming at their reparation for affected citizens.[v], we will also need transitional administrative and economic justice to create the legal, constitutional and infra-constitutional conditions for the creation of a new socio-political and institutional regime.
Today, this regime is legally immature to guarantee transfers to agents operating in the popular and solidarity economy circuits. The locus of science and technology policies is the one that best presents the fabric of organizations and actors capable of breaking down these barriers.
Fifty years ago, Brazil began to invest systematically in postgraduate studies and research to increase science and technology research in universities and foster its connection with technology-generating innovations in industry. However, much of the current STI model is not geared toward working with the social fabric of PPOs. On the contrary, it is largely geared toward the innovation system in business environments, as highlighted above. In the future, this official support should come to an end and be gradually replaced by private sector resources (business investment), as is the global trend.
In the academic sphere, there is a growing awareness that producing science and technology in the form of technoscientific applications should not be a movement to plunge the entire society into the risk of producing science for the market and abandoning the principle of knowledge as a value for common use, or public science (HERSCOVICI, 2007).
In Latin America, this movement of awareness among the scientific and technological community should open up even more to the popular public sphere as a dialogue of civil society (whose hegemony is controlled by the educated middle classes or those with many years of literacy), following the example of social movements similar to the Unión de Científicos Comprometidos con la Sociedad y la Naturaleza de América Latina (UCCSNAL)[vi], Scientists Concerned[vii] (USA) and Citizen Sciencess[viii](France).
New opportunities are beginning to be created by the mobilization of great critical capacities in scientific production generated by research and postgraduate courses at public universities to create alternatives to science and technology policies aimed at consumer markets, in application circuits guided by corporations.
Links under the S&TS approach in universities operate with numerous local and territorial initiatives. They seek to implement policy experiences in areas such as from software free, digital media in education and professional training for professional development, socio-technical projects for sustainability in municipalities regarding water resources, affordable housing, energy, transportation, environment, health and public sanitation, science, culture and arts workshops in municipalities. Among the latter, the experiences of direct reappropriation of the cultural industry (cinema and video, photography) by the social subjects themselves are relevant.
The S&TS approach to social technology in Brazil presents an exemplary case of S&TS Policy that we could call societal scientific thinking as opposed to managerial or corporate technoscientific thinking, originating from a strand of managerialist reform of the Brazilian State at the time of the State Reform in Brazil.[ix].
To achieve the complexity required by social demands for S&T in the country, there is still no clear solution under the regime of political pluralism that guides sectoral actions of ministerial policies regarding overcoming the common sense that believes that anyone can have access to state resources. For popular productive organizations, access to decision-making positions is not open or democratic – on the contrary, there are several layers of obstacles to accessing state resources.
Popular productive organizations (PPOs) generally face a dispersion in the face of the division of political labor that is not strictly public-private opposition (vertical), since they operate in realities where networks of networks (horizontal) predominate. In contrast to these limitations, groups organized in popular circuits seek to develop informal coalitions to mobilize resources to increase the growth of their influence by multiplying the spaces for action between networks of networks.
They form informal coalitions that face three types of resistance (when trying to obtain more resources from the State or expand public policies that benefit them): (i) lack of state entities interested in supporting the popular solidarity economy according to advantages for their programs; (ii) members of Congress (politicians) see informal coalitions as unreliable because they do not present electoral returns, which leads to failure to guarantee legislation and regulation of the sector (Eco Pop Sol) in Brazil; (iii) they face business groups whose economic interests prevent informal coalitions from accessing State resources (especially because this changes the formal labor relations system due to the entry into the scene of new actors with rights and, in their view, privileges in relation to the formal labor market).
Self-managed production initiatives originated at least two centuries ago in the West, aiming to counter the destructive tendencies of the capitalist economic regime. The formation of the working classes takes place in the face of bourgeois property-owning classes and their allies in territories that present strong resistance and repression to the associative principles of articulation. They are opposed by the vertical, hierarchical and managerial organization.
This contrast is made around associated work, which has shown itself capable of ensuring an organic character of the workers' institution and the establishment of bonds of solidarity with other social groups (family associations) in which workers were also active agents.
This self-management basis originally encompasses two functions that only later came to be divided: the organization for the production of means of subsistence, especially through the various forms of cooperativism (initially, mainly, production, consumption and credit), and the collective and political resistance to the implementation of capitalism that began to dominate all spheres of social life.
By replacing competition between workers with solidarity, and fragmentation with collectivism, these associative forms of production revealed a double aspect: of means and of end. The self-management of their struggles began to be seen by workers as inseparable from the self-management of production and social life (FARIA, 2005).
In Brazil, the solidarity economy – whether from the perspective of reducing poverty, through the generation of income by those who join together in groups to carry out a productive activity, or through a proposal for a fairer and more supportive organization of the economy – has presented a historic opportunity: to develop a vast experience of local productive arrangements in institutions and communities with the emergence of a sector around enterprises that obey the principles of democracy, cooperation and egalitarianism, having as a paradigm societal management for new forms of knowledge and development of capabilities.
But “lilies do not grow from laws” (Drummond). In order to guarantee the State the preconditions of equality for those seeking a dignified survival in the popular circuits of the economy, it is necessary to multiply the number of spaces for action, which generates a double effect: a relevant number of actors in a network support the same policy; this number, however, generates fragmentation. In what should be a division of labor and the fight for public rights in the face of private interests (of businessmen and their agents who control the labor market), the most important political division becomes network-to-network relations.
This is one of the reasons, in my view, for the failure in the period 2004-2016 of informal coalitions around the popular and solidarity economy to accommodate continued programs with socio-technical solutions such as tax incentives, exemptions and productive economic development policies for popular productive organizations (PPOs).
The movement failed to create a sector distinct from the legal regime that guides the capitalist sector (formal labor market that regulates the sale of labor power). The hopes that there will be a formalized category such as OPP generate the expectation (and the dream) that they can prosper on a large scale around the current arrangements and networks of collective productive enterprises, popular cooperatives, production-consumption-marketing networks, local financial institutions (microcredit) focused on popular solidarity enterprises, companies recovered by workers organized in self-management, family farming cooperatives, service provision cooperatives, among others (METELLO, 2007, CATTANI, 2003, SINGER, 2002, SANTOS, 1999, 2002, 2004, VALLE, 2002, PARREIRAS, 2007).
PPOs face four challenges when it comes to internally generating, in a supportive manner, commercial, technical and sociocultural relationships, or when they need to sell their products or provide their services. They have 60 to 70% of their transactions subject to the logic of the formal market that captures the energy, labor, intelligence and experience of resolution in the common sense of everyday life.
High school and technology education
Since 2004, public universities and Federal Institutes of Technology have been in the process of opening up to implement and evaluate a wide range of projects and actions that use the interdisciplinary approach to implement scientific and technological policies. Interdisciplinarity can provide solutions for research and extension policies in the country. One of the foundations of social technology and sociotechnical adaptation is to promote a social environment for this integration or dialogue between knowledge, popular practices and scientific knowledge on an interdisciplinary basis.
How will it occur and can it be further explored? Do researchers at universities share, for different reasons, the postulate of social inclusion, implicit in the exchange of science and knowledge? What is the cognitive dimension involved in the logic and instrumental rationality of scientific research in view of the potential for linking to social technologies already mapped?
Promoting differentiated markets through public procurement
The second challenge is directly related to the social dimension of markets. It involves creating utilitarian or mercantile rules present in production and service standards that are capable of absorbing social technologies. What market regime is appropriate for organic agriculture and agroecology movements, for example? How can this be linked to rural settlements and agrarian reform movements?
How to situate research and extension work for the management of the agroecological family farming market? How to analyze the formation of a service market for urbanization and environmental sanitation modalities in slums with social condominium sanitation technology?
Technical standards for marketing and consumption, environmental standards and promotion of regional brands
The third challenge concerns the technical standards of social technologies in food, production processes, techniques and adapted equipment (participatory certification seals, socio-environmental, employment and income generation, sustainable rural development), in addition to sanitary and human health regulations, necessary to allow their circulation in broader markets.
Science circulates through people
The fourth challenge is to regulate the movement of scientific and technological researchers between working-class communities and their children's access to universities, which were previously a monopoly of the white elite. This involves the construction of a national policy for technological extension, currently underway through the policy of quotas and openness to children of the working classes, as well as through the extraordinary prospect of expanding the structure of professional and technological education in Brazil (Federal Institutes of Technology). New forms of extension will emerge through university students living in popular environments at the base of the Brazilian pyramid with the children of the middle and working classes, bringing them closer to the country's popular communities. [X]
* Richard Neder, sociologist and political economist, is a professor at UnB and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Science and Technology.
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[I]. The neighborhood economy is a type of solidarity economy that is expressed, for example, in exchange clubs, residents' associations and mothers' clubs. The social subject in this case is territorially close or a neighbor through ties of kinship, friendship or comradeship.
[ii]. See, in this regard, sociological and anthropological contributions that identified around thirty different types of social technology practices in specific communities in Brazil (cf. Alfredo Wagner, www.ufam.br. Department of Anthropology) threatened by manifestations of environmental racism. Access: http://racismoambiental.net.br/quem-somos/. This is an action research and social movement based on the assumption that, in the current model of “development”, the destruction of the environment and collective living and working spaces, as well as disrespect for citizenship and human beings, are predominant where the State cannot prevent the asymmetry of rights, as is the case of remote communities in places where quilombolas, indigenous peoples and other traditional communities live. This process also affects black and migrant populations, mostly from the Northeast region, who live in risky situations in the large and small urbanized cities of Brazil, but where this logic of (a)symmetry also manifests itself in territories considered to be peripheral.
[iii]. The argument here is simple: there will always be some degree of creation for social technology environments if programs capable of qualifying technical networks with the wisdom of the first aspect are adopted, which is to value the social subject. All social technology depends on this interactionism. Qualified popular participation involves the creation of these environments (TRAVASSOS, 2016). Testimonies I heard from popular participants and technicians of the program on cisterns in the semiarid region say that the bricklayer or the people who build the cisterns with the families should be mobilized in the neighborhood economy of the community itself. If it does not exist, it should be trained to give rise to exchanges with the communities around social technology.
[iv]. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) points out that the private sector leads investments in R&D in the world. In 2017, the United States invested US$ 548 billion in R&D, with 62,5% of the investment made by private companies and 23,1% by the public sector. According to a researcher in the field, “despite the large difference in average productivity when comparing Brazilian and European companies, it is possible to observe that Brazilian industrial and service companies are not standing still. The number of innovative companies seeking to launch new products and processes on the market is relatively large in Brazil, when compared to that of European countries. In Europe, 56 thousand of the 346,7 thousand companies launched new products or processes on the market. In Brazil, 38,6 thousand of a total of 113,4 thousand innovated. The dynamism of the Brazilian economy can also be observed in companies that, despite not having launched new products and processes on the market, implemented organizational or management innovations marketing. There are 36 thousand companies in Brazil and 33 thousand companies in the 15 EU countries” (DE NEGRI, 2022).
[v]. This definition was inaugurated in the UN Secretary-General's Report to the Security Council on the topic of rule of law and transitional justice. Report of the Secretary-General, “The rule of Law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies”, S/2004/616, para. 8: “The notion of 'transitional justice' discussed in the present report comprises the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation” (Source: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/527647). There are four pillars of transitional justice: Right to Memory and Truth; Reparation; Criminal Accountability; Reform of Security Institutions.
[viii]. http://sciencescitoyennes.org/
[ix]. It is worth remembering that (in 1994) “(…) there was no unequivocal vision of reform in the political scenario, as a new reformist paradigm was also underway: the brand new State social movement (…) that re-articulates the State and society, combining representative and participatory democracy (…). In reality, the societal aspect (of State reform, RTN) is not the monopoly of a party or political force, nor does it present the same clarity and consensus as the managerial aspect in relation to the objectives and characteristics of its political project” (PAULA, 2005).
[X]. This article is an updated version of an article published in 2008: RT Neder. State and civil society in the face of the new solidarity economy in Brazil (What Governance and Controllability?). Journal of the Court of Auditors of the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, September 1, 2008. NEDER, RT Scientific and technological policy: counter-hegemonic experiences at the university (STS Fundamentals - Science, Technology, Society). João Pessoa/PB-Brasília: Eduepb: Paraíba State University Press; Marília: Anticapital Struggles, 2023. chap.10 (pp.273-288)
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