Reclaiming the shoreline: Relational ecological stewardship as decolonial coastal planning in Brazil

Coastal territories are critical for confronting the challenges of climate change, yet they remain disproportionately subject to overdevelopment, ecological degradation, and social displacement. In Brazil, national infrastructure programs like the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) and the Merchant Marine Fund have intensified these dynamics by promoting industrial port expansion at the expense of coastal Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities. This article examines the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS) in Pernambuco as a paradigmatic case of how neodevelopmentalist planning perpetuates environmental racism and territorial dispossession. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research with Afro-Brazilian fishing and shellfish-collecting communities in Cabo de Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, I explore how residents confront these extractive planning regimes not only through resistance but through embodied, everyday forms of ecological care. The article develops the concept of relational ecological stewardship to theorize how traditional communities enact alternative planning practices grounded in ancestral knowledge, intergenerational obligation, and more-than-human responsibility. Through restoring access to ancestral territories, practicing gendered and intergenerational ecological knowledge, and repairing damaged ecosystems, residents articulate a planning paradigm rooted not in profit or technocratic control but in reciprocity and relational ethics. These struggles are situated within broader histories of colonial land regimes and racialized enclosure, revealing how coastal planning continues to reinforce unequal power structures. By centering the perspectives of historically marginalized communities, this article contributes to decolonial and environmental justice scholarship, and challenges dominant planning frameworks that treat traditional lifeways as obstacles to development. Instead, it argues that these communities already embody the principles of sustainability and justice that coastal governance claims to seek. Recognizing and supporting relational ecological stewardship is not just an ethical imperative—it is a necessary strategy for building more just, livable, and ecologically resilient coastal futures.