Infrastructure, Development, and Territory

The project aims to present a renewed line of inquiry into the relationships between infrastructure, development, and territory, reinforcing the heritage of originality that characterizes Latin American and Brazilian socioeconomic thought. To this end, the research will be grounded in the contemporary trajectory of the national capital accumulation process and will recognize the multiscalar particularities of the national development style.

The research is expected to deepen, with an appropriate theoretical calibration, the understanding of infrastructure provision and its territorial effects. This task assumes that infrastructure services and equipment are the result of hegemony within the current social pact in the country. Therefore, it rejects the reductionist emphasis of conventional approaches, which link competitiveness and infrastructure while promoting a true sociopolitical sanitization by highlighting successful cases and canonical models supposedly replicable in any reality. By acknowledging the existence of conflicts, the proposed research will seek to identify broader determinants that shape social struggles over infrastructure provision, examining institutional arrangements and rearrangements, governance models, funding patterns, and the associated territorial effects.

This is a methodological proposal intended to simultaneously capture the general conditions of capital accumulation in Brazil and the partiality of socioeconomic, political, and institutional phenomena materialized within the national territory. To this end, comparative studies will be conducted between projects of different natures in the country, relating them to similar experiences in developed countries.