Social participation and the politics of climate in Northeast Brazil

This article examines social participation in the circulation of climate forecasts in the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil. In that part of the country, the work of meteorology is subject to public scrutiny in newspapers and other forms of public communication, and is also confronted with the work of the rain prophets of rural areas. This creates a social context in which other forms of knowledge other than the scientific one, and other forms of voices other than the scientifically authorized ones, constitute a public arena in which environmental issues and their economic, social and cultural impacts are publicly debated. The article uses the cases of the public participation in meteorology to discuss how environmental citizenship is constructed in local practices, and the challenges and difficulties found in the process. How does one recognize citizenship, and environmental citizenship for that matter, as it exists in Latin America? As expressed by a number of the other contributions to this volume, the idea of citizenship becomes meaningful only when analyzed against specific historical and institutional backgrounds. The region has experienced a wide variety of political contexts for citizenship over the past century, ranging from centralized dictatorships to relatively decentralized liberal regimes, each context making way for different kinds of political subjectivity. It is a given that hegemonic political agents will attempt to exert influence over the symbolic terrain upon which subject formation occurs; at the same time, this control is never absolutely effective and subjects invariably find ways of contesting the hegemonic symbolic order (Bourdieu 1991; Scott 1985, 1990). The discursive framing of ideas, problems and identities is a particularly potent element of such