This project has policy targets:
- To advise mayors about economic dependency and its economic, political and social consequences. Could companies help diversifying local economies while they are economically healthy and seeking to renew licenses?
- When dependent on one company only, the decline of such company may mean the breakdown of local governments and the diaspora of most residents. These municipalities suffer an abrupt drop in their GDP and run out of resources to provide basic services to the population. To close down the schools, to no longer have a health centre, to live in a street without neighbours can be a traumatic experience. Our research draws on similar cases from across the world on topics such as relocation and re-attraction of residents.
- This project will collaboratively create a destiny to under-used industrial structures in the municipalities mapped.
Other industrial sectors and other countries:
- Though we started this project looking only at mineral extractive industries in Brazil, we are expanding this research to also look at towns with oil extraction and transformation activities. In addition, cities that are strongly influenced by soy plantations will also enter this mapping.
- We will share our datasets and methodologies to make this work comparable with other monotowns in the world.
Academically, our targets are:
We look at political-economic history of targeted extractive municipalities to offer a dataset about these locations which includes: Mapping, Economic data, Migration history, Public Health and Demographic accounts. We also look at selected extractive municipalities to discuss how long-term extractive activities affect people and places. When we zoom in on case studies and describe economic, social, and political aspects in disappearing or economically dependent towns.
Outcomes:
We will focus on the publication of academic papers, policy orientation, maps and datasets of one-company towns in Brazil. Our goal is also, in the future, to prepare booklets for mono-towns mayors, with the aim of orienting towards the need to diversify the local economic matrix to guarantee permanent sustainable development of these territories.
To read about this project in Portuguese, please click here.