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This paper analyzes the discursive field of "Social Management" of populations resettled by large hydroelectric projects. The implementation of large development projects has been driving the processes of capitalist accumulation in Latin America. In the hydroelectric sector, such implementation usually implies the displacement and resettlement of populations and provokes multiple adverse consequences for them, such as affecting the bases necessary for their material and cultural reproduction, their social support networks, and sources of income, the modification of their ways of life, among others. The debate between 1970 and 2000 attributed the occurrence of these impacts to the absence of resettlement plans. However, we suggest that the existence of plans does not guarantee the absence of adverse effects and that they can rather exert renewed forms of social control that should be considered in order to understand the mechanisms that allow the persistence of conditions of social and environmental inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work analyzes the environmental impact study of the Porce III hydroelectric power station, built in the 2000s in Colombia, from a sociological perspective, more specifically in relation to the social impacts' treatment. This "management of the social" is understood as a government apparatus: an arrangement of lines of visibility, enunciation, power, and subjectification by means of which the behavior of the resettled populations is oriented. The paper particularly approaches the first group of lines. The data came from both the documentary analysis and the professional work experience of the researcher in the studied resettlement. The researcher submitted the information on existing regulations, justifications of the company and its financiers, environmental studies and management measures to an interpretative analysis in light of the theoretical reference's categories. The study allows identifying that the construction, definition, and delimitation of a specific reality are brought about by means of instruments, discourses, and techniques of the environmental impact study. Once companies established that reality, they manage it while making viable the business of power generation. The research argues that other realities with higher levels of democratization can be constructed to regulate the interactions between communities, companies, and the State in defining forms of territorial appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores the possibilities of resistance and critique emergence of the populations impacted by hydropower projects and forms of violence contained in the practices of what is being called "Social Management" in such contexts. This form of management is approached as a government apparatus as in Foucault (1980), Deleuze (1991) and Dean (2010), composed by lines of visibility, enunciation, power and subjectivity for conducting the interaction among companies, the State and the impacted communities. The forms of critique and resistance are understood as elements of the apparatus's subjectivity lines. And analyses of perceptions and manifestations of the affected populations emphasizing in their critical declarations to the process of displacement and resettlement is made, as well as to their sources of justification. Data are provided by documental analyses, ethnographic work and the previous experience of the researcher in the studied resettlement. A variety of discursive and non-discursive strategies to subvert the order promoted by the managerial rationality of the apparatus is evidenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]