Marianne Schmink

Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon

Some coupled land–climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a ‘hybrid’ model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.

Experiments in Forest-Based Development in Western Amazonia

The state government of Acre, Brazil, has integrated ecological, cultural, social, and economic forest values into a comprehensive forest policy to manage Acres abundance of comparatively pristine forests, while couching specific goals and the processes for achieving them within a broader sustainable development framework. Inspired by the rubber tapper culture and social movement, policy implementation has been advanced with broad support from national and international allies. While these experiments in forest-based development serve as a hopeful alternative to the steady deforestation observed in Amazonia, many long-term ecological, economic, cultural, and political challenges remain for sustaining and adapting these policy initiatives.

Rubber tapper citizens: emerging places, policies, and shifting rural-urban identities in Acre, Brazil

In the 1970s and 1980s, a strong social movement of rubber tappers in the Amazonian state of Acre achieved remarkable policy goals, gaining new forms of land rights as well as political representation through their alliance with indigenous groups, environmentalists, political parties and human rights advocates. Allies of the social movement entered politics and took state power in 1999 as the “Forest Government,” building on the rubber tappers legacy to embrace the unique cultural and political history of the state, and implementing ambitious plans for forest-based development under the banner of “forest citizenship.” In the past 25 years, however, rubber tapper identity has changed rapidly as many rubber tappers migrate to urban areas, or increasingly shift from traditional rubber tapping to more intensive land uses such as commercial agriculture and small-scale animal husbandry. This paper uses data collected from household surveys, key-informant interviews and ethnographic research to explore the idea of what it means to be a “rubber tapper” and “forest citizen” today. We examine the contradictory nature of changing land-use and cultural revitalization efforts among diverse rural and urban populations, and the implications of this diversity for the future of the Forest Governments policies, and the rubber tappers.

Deforestation drivers in Southwest Amazonia: Comparing smallholder farmers in Iñapari, Peru, and Assis Brasil, Brazil

Broad interpretation of land use and forest cover studies has been limited by the biophysical and socio-economic uniqueness of the landscapes in which they are carried out and by the multiple temporal and spatial scales of the underlying processes. We coupled a land cover change approach with a political ecology framework to interpret trends in multi-temporal remote sensing of forest cover change and socio-economic surveys with smallholders in the towns of Inapari, Peru and Assis Brasil, Brazil in southwest Amazonia. These adjacent towns have similar biogeophysical conditions, but have undergone differing development approaches, and are both presently undergoing infrastructure development for the new Interoceanic highway. Results show that forest cover patterns observed in these two towns cannot be accounted for using single land use drivers. Rather, deforestation patterns result from interactions of national and regional policies affecting financial credit and road infrastructure, along with local processes of market integration and household resources. Based on our results we develop recommendations to minimise deforestation in the study area. Our findings are relevant for the sustainability of land use in the Amazon, in particular for regions undergoing large-scale infrastructure development projects.

Conservation and Development in Latin America and Southern Africa: Setting the Stage

The articles in this Special Feature stem from a 2010 conference (Bridging Conservation and Development in Latin America and Africa) organized by the University of Florida’s Tropical Conservation Development Program, Center for African Studies, and Center for Latin American Studies. The conference involved researchers and practitioners from Africa and Latin America focused on the complex and evolving relationship between conservation and development. The conference provided bridges between academics and non-academics, conservation and development, and theory and practice. The resulting comparative analyses focus on: empowerment of local institutions; enhanced capacity of local and regional stakeholders through a recognition and validation of local knowledge systems and the creation of knowledge networks; understanding of social and natural landscapes, history, contexts, and their evolution; and the roles of economic and market forces in shaping opportunities for using market-based incentives to promote conservation and development. In this introductory article we propose a conceptual framework based on the six connected pillars of natural resource characteristics, interactions of social actors, governance and participation, politics, information exchange, and economic issues that support spaces for both conflicts and synergies between conservation and development goals. Our goal is to foster informed dialogue and social learning to promote sustainability.

New Amazonian geographies: emerging identities and landscapes

Common stereotypes of a homogeneous Amazonia belie the complexity and diversity of peoples and landscapes across the region. Although often invisible to the outside world, diverse peoples—indigenous, traditional, migrant, urban dwellers and others—actively construct their identities and shape cultural and political landscapes in diverse ways throughout the region. This volume combines political ecology, with its emphasis on identity, politics, and social movements, with insights from cultural geographys focus on landscapes, identities and livelihoods, to explore the changing nature of Amazonian development. These papers focus on indigenous identity and cosmology; changing livelihoods and identities; and transboundary landscapes. They highlight the diversity of proactive, place-based social and political actors who increasingly raise their voices to contest and engage with Amazon development policies. Based on their history, social values, and livelihood practices, such groups propose alternative ways of understanding and managing Amazonian landscapes.

Attitudes and behaviors toward Amazon River dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) in a sustainable use protected area

Negative interactions between fishers and the Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffrensis), or boto, have increased substantially in the last few decades. Herein, we investigate these interactions with focus on assessing fisher perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors toward botos. Moreover, we evaluate the effect that the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve (MSDR) in the Brazilian Amazon, and related programs, has had on fisher attitudes and behaviors toward botos. The results suggest that interactions between fishers and botos, such as depredation and incidental entanglement, are frequent, and that the illegal harvest for botos, for use as bait, occurs in the majority of the study communities. However, the assessment revealed that most fishers have positive attitudes toward botos and that these attitudes have been influenced by participation in the MSDR activities such as research and ecotourism. Our results also highlight the importance of community-based enforcement in addressing the issue of boto harvesting. The MSDR programs have successfully promoted positive attitudes toward botos and have likely played a role in limiting boto mortality through behavioral controls, though the scope of influence of these programs has been restricted to a small geographical area. The current extent of these programs is insufficient to prevent the decline of the boto population; therefore, we suggest the MSDR model be used to improve and expand boto conservation efforts with communities in the region.

Reconnecting art and science for sustainability: learning from indigenous knowledge through participatory action-research in the Amazon

Sustainability science focuses on generating and applying knowledge to environmentally sound human development around the world. It requires working toward greater integration of different types of knowledge, ways of knowing, and between academy and society. We contribute to the development of approaches for learning from indigenous knowledge, through enhanced understanding of the system of values, meanings, and relationships afforded by indigenous arts. We focus on a long-term, participatory action research project developed for the revitalization of weaving knowledge among three Kawaiwete (also known as Kaiabi) indigenous groups in the Amazon. The problem was originally defined by indigenous communities, concerned with the erosion of weaving knowledge of basketry and textiles among men and women. Methods for coproduction of knowledge included dialogical methods and tools, indigenous-led strategies, and quantitative and qualitative approaches across biophysical and social sciences. Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies considered multiple dimensions, scales, and networks of knowledge creation, distribution, and transmission. Innovation and articulation with western systems, along with shamanism, gender, and leadership, were key factors enhancing artistic knowledge resilience. We reflect on lessons learned and implications of this initiative for broadening the understanding of art and science intersections toward a sustainable future.

From contested to ‘green’ frontiers in the Amazon? A long-term analysis of São Félix do Xingu, Brazil

The Amazonian frontier, shaped by developmentalist policies in the 1970s and 1980s and a socio-environmental response in the 1990s, has historically been a site of widespread violence and environmental destruction. After the imposition of new environmental governance measures in the mid-2000s, deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon dropped to historic lows. Many analyses of this ‘greening’ of Amazonia operate within a limited historical perspective that obscures complex and still-evolving contestation among diverse actors and projects. The long-term evolution of the frontier is illustrated dramatically in the municipality of São Félix do Xingu (São Félix). Emerging as a ‘contested frontier’ in the 1970s, São Félix in the early 2000s lost over 1000 km2 of forest annually, but since the mid-2000s, the municipality has entered a period of ‘greening’. This contribution deploys a historical political ecology framework to analyse how decades of agrarian frontier change and land conflicts among actors on the ground interacted with shifting national policy debates. Nearly a half-decade of field research in São Félix is combined with data from a 2014 field ‘revisit’ to situate the current ‘greening’ of policy and discourse within the longer term history of frontier development, revealing positive social and environmental developments and persistent contradictions and uncertainties.

Editors' Foreword: Contemporary Debates on Ecology, Society, and Culture in Latin America

For the past two decades, studies on ecology, society, and culture in Latin America have multiplied rapidly, mirroring the increasing importance of ecological and environmental debates worldwide. The environment has become the object of a multidisciplinary research endeavor in which the natural sciences, policy and technical sciences, social sciences, and humanities converge. This special issue of Latin American Research Review brings together some of today’s most innovative social science and humanities research on environmental issues in Latin America and aims to make it more widely known to scholars working in other ! elds of Latin American studies and to the public at large. Contributors come from such diverse disciplines as political science, geography, history, anthropology, and literary studies and adopt a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. From a geographical perspective, we have tried to be as broad as possible in our selection of articles to give readers a sense of contemporary environmental discussions in different parts of Latin America. Articles in this volume deal with Chile, Peru, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and particularly Brazil, which receives special attention because of its important role in contemporary conservation and environmental debates. Cases examined range from islands and aquatic environments to rain forests, agricultural ! elds, and protected conservation areas, from the rural-urban interface to the arenas of international policy making. Latin America’s historical dependency on natural resources, both for local livelihoods and to supply an evolving global market, has made environmental issues central in policy debates and in widespread contests over the meaning and use of natural species and habitats, carried out against the region’s persistent legacy of inequality. Many scholars of Latin America have addressed these complex issues from the perspective of economic development and globalization, but perhaps less so through the lens of environmental conservation. Yet the two are intertwined. Conservation of protected areas has grown worldwide, as has the mobilization of citizens at different levels, often in unlikely alliances, to propose new, alternative models for the governance of natural resources that incorporate diverse perspectives and stakeholders in often complex transactions. As conservation has become internationalized, these debates have meshed with the development concerns long of interest to scholars of Latin American studies, through parallel streams