Plantaformas: A Framework to Organize Assemblies in the Amazon

Octree has been working to strengthen collaborative governance with a focus on environmental and climate issues in the Amazon region. Voca’s supported the launch of Plantaformas with our partners in Brazil Nômade Technologias.

Deconstructing Internal Colonialism

Like any country, Brazil has economically developed regions and less developed ones. Power structures always rely on the economy to organize and assert authority over peripheral territories. In the context of Brazil, Amazonian territories often suffer from neglect by authorities on one side, and on the other, they are frequently influenced by external policies and corporate strategies that dictate how they should behave and what technologies they may use.

Citizen participation is no exception, but there is hope. Organizing local citizen participation and allowing peripheral and ancestral communities (indigenous, quilombola, and riverside) from different cultures and realities to self-organize democratically may be the missing brick needed to counterbalance abuses of power and inequalities imposed by colonizing agents represented by the economically more powerful states within the country.

Citizen Assemblies Composed of Youths from the 9 States of Legal Amazon

The Confluências Amazônicas working group is composed of 13 indigenous, quilombola, and riverside representatives, each representing a state of the Legal Amazon. In addition to receiving technopolitical training, they also participate in training on the use of social participation platforms, and each of the leaders aims to organize working groups (assemblies) and develop modes of collaborative participation and governance in their territory.

Plantaformas have 3 years to make this Amazonian network of activists and ancestral peoples work and thus unlock more philanthropic funding

Supported by Hivos, Plantaformas have 3 years to prove that this approach produces results in order to unlock the next round of funding, which would allow this model to be reused in all states of Brazil with peripheral communities and ancestral peoples.

The Example of the "I Want You Elected" Assembly within the Platforms

It is no secret that traditional peoples (indigenous, quilombolas, and riverside dwellers) have been influenced by colonialism for generations: shaping behaviors and sometimes dissolving social ties based on tradition is not an easy task when proposing another "better way of doing things" as an external, non-indigenous person, without rekindling past traumas linked to colonialist behavior.

However, micro-colonialism is also present, even in the simple form of common paternalism, for example. In the case of the “I Want You Elected” assembly, it was decided that an assembly formed solely of women, especially indigenous, black, and riverside women, from the Plantaformas is launching a national political movement with a focus on the Amazon to elect women mayors and councilors with the goal of breaking paternalistic patterns that parasitizes the governance process and reproduce habits of internal oppression at the local and national levels currently.

Note on the authors

Jader Gama is the Plantaformas project founder.

Nomade Technologias are project lead and Voca Partners in Brazil

— Lucien for Voca