Abstract
This article aims to a sociological interpretation of the discourses of the World Bank in the field of cognitive struggles for the construction of knowledge and the legitimate prescriptions for rural development. These discourses were searched in five World Bank’s reports dedicated to the theme from 1995 to 2015, which show a shift in agriculture’s role to rural spaces. In the analyzed period, the initial documents the initial documents aim to build a broad view of rural, in a territorial approach that stimulates economic diversification and collective participation. Secondly, the emphasis shifts towards strengthening agriculture and the need to raise agricultural productivity to ensure food security; this position is reinforced at a third moment, when the Bank associates agriculture with climate change. The study highlights that the World Bank’s prescriptions on rural development are largely based on the universal resources of calculation and predictability of modern science. The effect is the evaluation and the modeling of material and symbolic exchanges taken as legitimate in rural territories - actions that incur on practices of local population and demand the docilization of bodies for new institutional and market controls in the relation with the environment. At last, the effectiveness of the reform of the World Bank’s discourses on rural development in emerging countries is also articulated with the fluidity of the spaces of domination and power exercise in global scale.
Keywords:
rural development; new ruralities; ruralities and social theory; World Bank