SOWING HOPE, HARVESTING JUSTICE How Vila Nova Esperança transformed the environment into an ally to claim rights

In her talk Luciana Mascarenhas will present the case of Vila Nova Esperança community, in São Paulo, Brazil. The residents of this ‘favela’ resisted the state-driven ‘degradation narrative’ that blamed them for degrading a neighboring state park. To counter this narrative, residents collectively started to clean their neighborhood, plant vegetables and build living spaces with reused materials. She described the factors that enable and legitimize, and the benefits arising from, these environmental initiatives. Through the years, the community has successfully gotten the right to stay and achieved access to basic services and infrastructure, provided by the same state agencies that once were considered enemies.

» Link to her Master's thesis at Lund University

Luciana Mascarenhas is a recent graduate from LUMES, Lund University’s Master programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science. She has an environmental engineering degree from University of São Paulo and is currently working as a research assistant at the solid waste comparative project from Mistra Urban Futures. She has 4 years of work experience at ERM, a multinational environmental consultancy, where she has been involved with impact assessment and permitting, compliance audits, stakeholder engagement, private social investment, among others. She has conducted field work in Brazil, Mozambique, Kenya and Sweden, interviewing from Amazonian açaí berry pickers to government officials, from female farmers to University researchers.