Redimensionando a esfera pública: o papel e as práticas das ONGs ambientalistas e suas interações com os demais atores sociais

Abstract

This research has as its objective of investigation the environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO). It tries to clarify the modus operandi of their activities and inter-relationships with the other social actors, identifying their potentialities and limitations concerning their ability of establishing a new perception for the environmental cause.

The emergency of new social actors responds to a new reconfiguration of the occidental societies, which was caused among other factors by technological development that transformed the political, economical and social spheres. These transformations, still in action, strengthened the environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), making them relevant characters in the environmental cause. These organizations develop the function of mobilizing, organizing and including the other social actors, generating a new dynamic in the contemporaneous social formations.

The environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) appear as a new important possibility of changing for the public areas, allowing the social cooperation and development. They tend to operate as partially responsible for the social demands, establishing, when necessary, partnerships with the State and with the private sectors of the economy. They can be generally defined as non-profit-making private organizations, which do actions of public character.

In the first part of this project, the main theoretical formulations, which deal with factors that allow the emergency and protagonist role of the environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), were examined, trying to contribute to delimit in a more precise way their area of action. In a following moment, there was a research whose objectives were mapping, identifying and elucidating these actions, considering their interdependence and inter-relationship with the other social actors