Flavia Leite

Trans-boundary infrastructure, access connectivity, and household land use in a tri-national frontier in the Southwestern Amazon

The land science literature has consistently documented the importance of infrastructure for land use. Less attention has gone to land use around national borders receiving trans-boundary infrastructure upgrades for cross-border integration. We take up the case of the Inter-Oceanic Highway, a trans-boundary road being paved in the tri-national ‘MAP’ frontier of the southwestern Amazon. We draw on a tri-national survey of households in rural communities across the MAP frontier to evaluate the effects of access connectivity on land use. At the time of fieldwork, paving was complete in Acre/Brazil, underway in Madre de Dios/Peru, and planned in Pando/Bolivia. This permits a tri-national comparative analysis. The results confirm different effects of access connectivity on land use by paving status; further, they also document cross-border processes stemming from trans-boundary infrastructure that affect land use. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of regional integration initiatives on landscapes.

Tenure diversity and dependent causation in the effects of regional integration on land use: evaluating the evolutionary theory of land rights in Acre, Brazil

ABSTRACT In the complex causation behind land change, dependent causation can play a central role. A case in point concerns land tenure diversity, where contrasting use rules for different lands may affect the impacts of other drivers on land use outcomes. We therefore evaluate the evolutionary theory of land rights (ETLR), which assumes homogeneous private property rights, in order to test for dependent causation due to distinct use rules among various types of private lands. In the present analysis, we focus on whether land tenure type modifies the effects of highway infrastructure on key outcomes highlighted in the ETLR framework. We take up the case of rural settlements along the Inter-Oceanic Highway in the eastern part of the Brazilian state of Acre, where there is considerable land tenure diversity. Findings from multivariate models for land titling, the castanha nut harvest, and cattle pasture all indicate that the effects of infrastructure depend on land tenure type. These results confirm the importance of dependent causation behind land use and bear implications for theory on land change, infrastructure impacts, and land system science.

Future directions for applications of political economy in environmental and resource sociology: selected research priorities going forward

ABSTRACT Environmental and resource sociology has long featured political economy perspectives among its diverse theoretical retinue. Whether based on treadmills, modernization or other frameworks, political economy perspectives have influenced a growing body of environmental and resource sociology research. Recent reviews of environmental and resource sociology offer broad evaluations of the evolving state of the field, highlighting political economy theories and research needs. In this paper, we complement those reviews by suggesting a selection of specific topics informed in various ways by political economy perspectives as future directions in environmental and resource sociology. We prioritize research questions as applications of political economy perspectives to additional issues, sometimes via cross-fertilizations with other theoretical approaches, and thereby offer innovative directions for future research. The four topics are (1) food justice, critical animal studies and the industrial food system; (2) green criminology; (3) social media, social movements and environmental change; and (4) performativity. For each topic, we overview foundational arguments, noting relationships to political economy thought and briefly reviewing recent empirical work, before proposing specific research questions to inform future inquiry. While other topics are indeed valuable, we suggest that the assets of those we feature offer particularly innovative and fruitful directions. We conclude by discussing other research topics that also present intriguing opportunities.