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Throughout Brazilian history, Northeastern droughts have been the context for massive rural flight and intra-national migrations. State policies and interventions have played a significant role in promoting or restraining the movements of those affected by such "natural" plights. In this paper, we examine the political ecology and moral economies that have underlined state intervention over drought and peasant migrations since the end of the 19th century. We compare two historical periods marked by contrasting regional perspectives on nature-society relations within the context of Brazilian semi-arid climate: the period known as the "fight against drought" (1915-1980) and the period of "coexistence with the semi-arid" (1990-now). This new vision of nature-society relations is examined within the context of agrodiesel development in Bahia. Our results show that these symbolic and material practices around nature and mobility have played a significant role in the making of specific regimes of conviviality and inequality in Brazil.

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This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city. A critical value perspective on this specific case demonstrates that waste and “humans-as-waste” “switching” from not-value to value-in-the-making does not represent a way of escaping abjection and exploitation. Instead, the inclusion of cooperative collectors into the municipal recycling collection program has resulted in new forms of dispossession, through state-increased control over recyclables and in the municipality appropriating the value produced by the struggles, knowledge, and informal collective labor of the collectors. The right to the city for waste workers in Salvador therefore entails the right to work with dignity and the re-appropriation of waste as the urban commons to create livelihoods based on labor relations and regimes of value against and beyond capitalism.