(Sustainable) Development and Socio-Environmental Justice: local practices in Conceição da Barra, Espírito Santo, Brazil

Development practices occupy a position in between global and local spaces; its meaning and main strategies are defined in international networks, while its practices are ultimately applied in localities that can be defined as ‘opaque spaces,’ or areas less influenced by science, technology, and information (Santos, 2006). In global spaces, the concept of ‘development’ has been updated to include dimensions beyond economic growth and industrial modernization. The term coined was ‘Sustainable Development’ which has become a trendsetter in policy-making as set by the United Nations in 2015 for a common global goal to be pursued through seventeen categories – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – which consider not only economic but also social and environmental targets to be achieved by 2030. In local spaces, development practices arrived long before they were called ‘sustainable’ and, depending on the local interlocutor, have very different narratives about their successes and failures. This research aims to address how sustainable development contributes to local socio-environmental justice compared to the former practices of development conducted in territories, through a qualitative case study analysis of the peripheral municipality of Conceição da Barra, in the northeast of the Espírito Santo state in Brazil.