Everyday Acts of Resistance: Reflexive Practices in Environmental Peacebuilding (IN FRENCH)

Renata Fontoura, University of Montreal (Brazil/Portugal)

This paper reimagines environmental peacebuilding through an ethnographic exploration of everyday professional practices within Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). Moving beyond normative and technocratic framings, it examines how environmental specialists —operating under precarious contracts, managerial control, and corporate censorship—negotiate their ethical commitments and agency within neoliberal systems of governance. Through the lens of anthropology, the paper reveals how these actors reinterpret their roles, create informal networks of trust and mentorship, and craft spaces of reflexivity that challenge the dominance of instrumental rationalities. By focusing on the micro-dynamics of professional life—where ethics, power, and responsibility are continuously renegotiated—it highlights how alternative modes of environmental peacebuilding emerge not from institutional reforms but from everyday acts of resistance. This perspective calls for a reorientation of environmental governance toward the recognition of lived practices, moral labor, and the relational foundations of sustainability.