François-Michel Le Tourneau

Environmental governance for all

Involving local and indigenous populations is key to effective environmental governance In a world increasingly thought of as overpopulated, sparsely populated spaces remain a dominant feature: ~57% of Asia, ~81% of North America, and ~94% of Australia have population densities below 1 person per square kilometer, equivalent to the population density of most of the Sahara desert (1). These vast, sparsely populated landscapes include rural settlements, towns, agricultural spaces, extractive economies, indigenous lands, and conservation areas. They are crucial for climate change adaptation and mitigation, from carbon sequestration to provisioning of water, food, and energy to cities. Yet governmental and nongovernmental initiatives tend to mostly pay lip service to the diverse views and needs of their populations. Without more inclusive governance, attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change and conserve ecosystems will be compromised.

Assentamentos rurais na Amazônia: contradições entre a política agrária e a política ambiental

Apos quase quatro decadas de existencia, a acao do INCRA na Amazonia revela um paradoxo: por mais que a ocupacao humana daquela regiao fosse uma estrategia dos governos militares, e na fase democratica recente que a reforma agraria brasileira intensifica a instalacao de agricultores em projetos de assentamento. Por outro lado, a institucionalizacao de politicas de protecao do meio ambiente, marcante nas duas ultimas decadas, se revela contraditoria com as praticas de protecao social que tem, na Amazonia, um foco de destaque num modelo de reforma agraria que provoca inevitaveis consequencias ambientais.

The DURAMAZ indicator system: a cross-disciplinary comparative tool for assessing ecological and social changes in the Amazon

During the last 20 years, the Amazon region has been at the same time a place of massive ecological and social change and a laboratory of experiments aimed at promoting sustainable development. Policies and project initiatives involving diverse social groups and environmental contexts have been implemented across the region. They have resulted in mixed outcomes and trade-offs between social and environmental dimensions, making their impact at the local level difficult to assess and their successes difficult to generalize. The objective of the DURAMAZ research project was to provide a better understanding of these impacts. It produced a multi-dimensional indicator system designed to allow a holistic view of sustainable development at local and subregional levels and a comparative perspective across 12 research sites, from an isolated indigenous village to smallholders and agribusiness areas in Mato Grosso. The results of the first observation campaign (2007–2009) show that despite the claim of promoting sustainable development, no project was able to untie the ‘Gordian knot’ of development in the Amazon. Communities continue to face the old dilemma of either enjoying a preserved ecosystem but enduring adverse life conditions, or enjoying better living at the expense of forest cover. Another finding is that the subregional context is very important in shaping the impacts of regional policies. Thus, the same policy will not always have the same effect, depending on in which context it is applied. Finally, we found that cultural factors and a sense of place play a more important role than economic factors when it comes to the way people evaluate their own situation. This research provides the basis for a second phase of the project (2012–2016) in which we will continue to expand our sample and to refine our methodologies with the goal of transforming the initiative into a network of observatories of sustainable development in the Amazon.

Assessing the impacts of sustainable development projects in the Amazon: the DURAMAZ experiment

Since 1992, a boom of “sustainable development projects” has been registered in the Brazilian Amazon, turning it into a kind of open-air laboratory for sustainability. But their real impacts remain unclear, especially because of inadequate evaluation tools. A new device is therefore needed to unveil the inner mechanisms of development aid despite the difficulties linked with the diversity of contexts or the heterogeneity in the relevant parameters. Those are the challenges we met when we engaged in comparing the impacts of sustainable development programs in 13 sites throughout the Brazilian Amazon in order to identify determining factors of sustainability. To achieve our objective, we conceived an indicator system based on the results of intensive fieldwork, including social, economic, environmental, and biographical issues. Our results show that the most prominent problem of sustainability—evaluation of effectiveness—has not been tackled; life conditions and environmental preservation continue to appear antagonistic. At the same time, variability appears among outwardly coherent social groups, showing that a case-to-case approach is definitely indispensable and confirming the need to go “beyond panaceas” to find resolutions. This article successively addresses three points. First, we present the starting point of our research, or how the Amazon region was turned into a laboratory for sustainability and how our research project aimed at analyzing the consequences of this trend. Second, we discuss how available indicator systems fail to respond to the need for a multidimensional evaluation at the local level and, therefore, how we constituted our own analytical tool. Third, we focus on some results that can be derived from our system, especially in terms of identifying key factors needed to achieve sustainability in the Amazon.

Local rainfall trends and their perceptions by Amazonian communities

Climate change in the Amazon region is the subject of many studies not only due to its stance as an emblematic ecosystem but also as a region where changes have been dramatic for over 30 years, mainly due to deforestation. We investigate how people settled in the Amazon perceive environmental changes by comparing these perceptions with satellite rainfall data for 12 sites representing the community diversity in the region. Perceptions are varied and agreement with physical, measured data is not always good. However, the arc of deforestation, where the downward trend of rainfall is more strongly observed, also appears as the region where the populations have the highest perception of rainfall change.