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Building on ethnographic research conducted in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this paper seeks to reframe the industrial contamination problem. From critiques of neoliberalism to Marxist-oriented environment theories, industrial contamination is understood as asecondary effectof a larger problem of the capitalist system. There are at least four, often overlapping, ways of understanding the pervasiveness of the problem,via: (1) cost-benefit analyses, which determine it to be cheaper to remediate environmental damages than prevent them; (2) weak regulation, which shapes those cost-benefit analyses; (3) the externalisation of certain costs onto third (usually marginalised) parties; and (4) contradictions inherent to capital accumulation which promote the destruction of the very environmental conditions that capital depends on. Curiously, even where contamination is conceptualised as an inherent and necessary feature of capitalism, it appears as collateral damage, as the ‘unintentional by-product’ of something-other, rather than a ‘conscious imposition of “power over”’ a particular group of people (De Angelis, M. 2004. ‘Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures’.Historical Materialism12:2, 57–87). This is curious because small farmers and indigenous people affected by a devastating oil-related disaster in Ecuador describe contamination otherwise – as a kind of targeted, chemical warfare against those living ‘in the way of’ extractive operations. Dealing with the narrative gap between those lived experiences of contamination and the expert discourses about it, this paper introduces the concept of an ‘incentive to contaminate’. By critically expanding the prevailing theories, the concept turns greater attention to the productive work that contamination does for the oil industry, thus challenging socio-legal categories of intent that impede environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Economistic approaches to the study of peasant livelihoods have considerable academic and policy influence, yet, we argue, perpetuate a partial misunderstanding - often reducing peasant livelihood to the management of capital assets by rational actors. In this paper, we propose to revitalize the original heterodox spirit of the sustainable livelihoods framework by drawing on Stephen Gudeman's work on the dialectic between use values and mutuality on the one hand, and exchange values and the market on the other. We use this approach to examine how historically divergent mutuality-market dialectics in different Amazonian regions have shaped greater prominence of either extractivism or agriculture in current livelihoods. We conclude that an approach centered on the mutuality-market dialectic is of considerable utility in revealing the role of economic histories in shaping differential peasant livelihoods in tropical forests. More generally, it has considerable potential to contribute to a much-needed re-pluralization of approaches to livelihood in academia and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The conventional understanding of environmental governance implicitly assumes a priori presence of citizen rationality that underpins constitution of civil society vis-à-vis state. This assumption tends to overlook the economic and ecological consequences of social interactions through which people with diverse forms of rationality gradually produce distinction between state and society and shape environmental governance as an embedded process. This paper presents a case study of spontaneous settlers called posseiros in the south-east of the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon and examines ways that their social interactions lead to the so-called emancipation movements for municipal making on the agrarian frontier and open civic places in which environmental governance is negotiated. It pays particular attention to the role of religion, especially the Pentecostal Church of Assembly of God in relation to the traditional Catholic Church, in influencing the posseiros' ecological rationality and the articulation of emancipation movements and argues that the focus on religion sheds new light on the linkage between the environment, livelihoods and local governance. The paper concludes by discussing pragmatic implications of the case study for promoting sustainable rural development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper discusses the dynamics behind the establishment of scientific representations (e.g. reports, measurements, experiments) to the detriment of local representations (e.g. oral accounts, metaphors, symbols) in environmental policy-making in the Global South. To this end, the paper attempts to understand why local accounts of the Amazon in recent decades have gradually been replaced by satellite-based remote sensing (RS) technology in the region''s policy-making. RS technology is shown to provide representations that match policy-makers discourses as regards the importance of: visibility, since satellite images are believed to provide a transparent window from which the Amazon can be seen by policy-makers working from centres of power; comprehensiveness, since the data obtained through RS claims to represent the entire region; and determinacy, as forecasting and spatial correlation techniques establish deterministic links between particular factors (e.g. the presence of farmers, inflation) and environmental issues (e.g. increases in deforestation). From this examination, it is argued that rather than focusing on identifying the essential differences between local and scientific representation, more attention should be paid to how different kinds of representations are in harmony or conflict with historically rooted governance discourses. The article also indicates that in order to revalue local representations in environmental policy-making it is necessary to challenge particular discourses which are “taken-for-granted” in governance practices at the present time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary Participatory approaches have proven effective at producing more inclusive and democratic forms of development, in which marginalized groups are given increased recognition. However, these approaches can also reinforce social hierarchies and political exclusion if they are not developed and implemented carefully. In particular, participatory approaches can be problematic if they too simplistically conceptualize democratic engagement as the folding of individuals into pre-existing governance structures. Utilizing a combination of feminist and postcolonial theories, this paper argues that practitioners of participatory methods must extend their thinking to the ways in which their projects foster engagement across multiple social and epistemological perspectives. Participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) methodologies are particularly effective at enabling these cross-perspectival engagements—geospatial technologies have unique capabilities for storing and visualizing knowledge from different types of knowledge systems. These different forms of knowledge can not only be visualized as multi-facetted and multi-scalar layers, but they can be directly placed in conversation with one another within the space of the map. In this way, they can be used to fundamentally transform historically unjust governance practices, rather than simply folding new subjects into unjust political structures. The authors examine these claims in the context of a case study with the Maijuna indigenous group of the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. The authors collaborated with the Maijuna to create and use a digital, spatial database to influence policy decisions about land tenure and environmental management. We show that geospatial technologies were uniquely capable of encouraging dialog and integration across indigenous, Western scientific, and state-based perspectives of the Amazon. These technologies are particularly effective at empowering traditionally marginalized perspectives within governance processes. This project therefore offers lessons about the benefits and dangers of geospatial technologies and methodologies for improving the democratic potential of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper seeks to analyze local perspectives in Peruvian Amazon forest communities toward REDD and contrast those perspectives with current global and national REDD narratives. REDD is a global market-based approach to provide financial incentives for local actors to halt deforestation or to improve carbon stocks. To date, the REDD framework has not demonstrated that it is equipped to incorporate the diverse perspectives, potential interactions and uncertainties facing forest communities. We interviewed forest community members in the Amazonian state of Loreto, Peru, using “future scenarios” methods to elicit potential alternative narratives, both with and outside REDD. Indigenous voices reveal ambiguous attitudes toward REDD with regard to livelihoods, benefit distribution and the long-term impacts for communities and forests. They reveal considerable uncertainty about the future and lack of trust in governance regimes. Long-term community priorities were in generating work, providing educational opportunities for their children, and improving the quality of their forest. Conflict—within the community, with local loggers and with the recently established regional conservation area—was a prevalent theme. A REDD design that recognizes communities as active participants in global and national climate management and pays attention to local narratives will more likely generate the multiple benefits of healthy forests, strong communities and, ultimately, global climate change mitigation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper we analyze transformations within a land reform settlement in the Brazilian Amazon, with special land-use regulations targeting forest conservation. We conducted long-term action research in the Virola-Jatobá Sustainable Development Project (PDS), where peasant farmers who were the early settlers of the area, and more recent occupants allied to illegal loggers, land grabbers and speculators adopt antagonistic positions and challenge respective entitlements towards land and forest. In this research we highlight issues of power asymmetry and social injustice when assessing how social relations and environmental conditions in the study area are affected by land use and forest conservation policies since year 2000, when the scheme was established. The PDS situation approached a collapse in late 2017 when the integrity of its forests and the beliefs and practices of vulnerable local residents were damaged. This case study empirically demonstrates that Amazon forest frontier systems have a limited capacity to endure extreme perturbations in the social and ecological interconnected domains. We argue that when a threshold is reached in systems featuring heavily institutionalized social asymmetries that constrain the action of vulnerable resource users, few conditions remain to reorganize the constituent setup through adaptive changes in the same regime or state. Reaching this stage will likely result in drastic changes that will lock the system into a pathway that compromises human wellbeing and the provision of ecosystem services. The fundamental nature of a tenurial scheme that combines social justice and environmental conservation tends thus to be lost for good, to enter a new regime with fewer options and novelties in social-ecological advances, reflecting the overall setbacks currently experienced in Brazilian policy. • Failed delivery and enforcement of land and forest policy in Amazon forest frontier. • Land tenure modality in a liminal status between environmental and agrarian reform regulations. • Social support for conservation affected by political and economic factors mediated by governmental agencies. • A new regime takes place with lower complexity in both social and ecological terms. • Outcomes reflect overall setback in Brazil's current social and environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United Nations conference on environment and development, signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which obliges the signatory States to combat the extinction of species throughout the world. Its executive secretary said: "the services that nature offers us are free, but the man has a deep unconscious of what he represents their destruction [...] If humanity does not brake to the degradation of biodiversity, the legacy for future generations will be mortgaged [...] must have the courage to look our children in the eye and admit failure [...] admit that we continue losing biodiversity at an unprecedented pace, we are mortgaging their future". Words that initialed by premonitions future about the treatment of the extinction of a large part of the existing biodiversity, that if we do not a treatment, their destruction would speed up and we would be going against the new scheme of sustainable development. In this paper, I analyze and discuss from the perspective of social rights, environmental, and economic, compliance with subparagraphs (c) and (d) of article 10 of the said convention in the native communities of the Peruvian Amazon, an area of permanent armed con ict between the Peruvian State and the native communities. The work consists of six parts. The first explains the legal framework and jurisprudence; the second covers the methodology, and will draw attention to the method and the approach of hypotheses; the third the theoretical framework, the geographical framework and the gathering of information; The fourth on analysis and interpretation; in the fifth set out an analogy with some of the results of the European Union and countries of south America; in the sixth part formulates some conclusions and new perspectives for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main challenge on Brazil's environmental agenda today is illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which to a large extent is a result of the state being unable to fully control the use of its natural resources. To improve the situation, new pieces of legislation have been enacted, but not as part of an integrated policy for the region. This article analyses the legal evolution of land tenure laws and environmental regularisation laws enacted to reduce illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The study of the legislation discussed here uses the legal interpretative method. The primary sources used in the analysis are legal documents, combined with state and non-governmental organisations' reports on land regularisation and environmental implementation programmes in the region. It concludes that although land tenure and environmental regularisation were designed to be applied independently, agrarian activities have always been subject to environmental regulations. Recent deforestation monitoring indicates that deforestation rates are lower in areas that were subject to land tenure regularisation. For this reason, the strategy of the Brazilian Government since 2016 has been to formally integrate both regularisation activities through legal and policy modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the design of a new model-based assessment framework to identify and analyse possible future trajectories of agricultural development and their environmental consequences within the states of Mato Grosso and Pará in Southern Amazonia, Brazil. The objective is to provide a tool for improving the information basis for scientists and policy makers regarding the effects of global change and national environmental policies on land-use change and the resulting impacts on the loss of natural vegetation, greenhouse gas emissions, hydrological processes, and soil erosion within the region. For this purpose, the framework combines the regional land-use models, LandSHIFT and alucR, the farm-level model, MPMAS, and the MONICA crop model, with a set of environmental impact models that are operating at the regional and watershed levels. As a first application of the framework, four scenarios with the time horizon 2030 were specified and analysed. Future land-use change will strongly depend on the interplay between the production of agricultural commodities, the agricultural intensification in terms of increasing crop yields and pasture biomass productivity, and the enforcement of environmental laws and policies. On the regional level, the scenarios with the highest increase in agricultural production in combination with weak law enforcement ( Trend and Illegal Intensification) generated the highest losses in natural vegetation due to the expansion of agricultural area as well as the highest greenhouse gas emissions . Also, at the watershed level, these scenarios are characterised by the highest changes in river discharge and soil erosion that might lead to a further decline in soil fertility in the long term. Moreover, the analysis of the Sustainable Development scenario indicates that a shift in agricultural production patterns from livestock to crop cultivation, together with effective law enforcement, can effectively reduce land-use change and its negative effects on the environment. With the scenario analysis, we could illustrate that our assessment framework is capable to provide a large variety of valuable information to support the development of future land-use strategies in the study region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although promising advances in transdisciplinary scholarship have been made over the past several decades, the successful integration of disciplinary perspectives has yet to be realized. One avenue for fostering transdisciplinarity is experiential education at the graduate level where scholars are brought together in applied research contexts to solve complex problems. As graduate students in an applied conservation science program, we describe an experiential learning program that facilitated the development of research proposals and created transformative experiences. In this program we engaged in a field course in the Tambopata National Reserve and Bahuaja Sonene National Park in the Department of Madre de Dios, Peru, which was designed to teach us how to effectively engage with and learn from our peers. As a critical reflection on this course, we present five keys to transdisciplinary scholarship that were instrumental for interfacing with scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: 1) develop a common language, 2) cultivate connections with your peers, 3) assert your worth, 4) know the assumptions of your field, and 5) recognize ideological differences. Each key to integration facilitated the process of integrating different forms of knowledge and learning about how to most effectively translate environmental policies into practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community-level institutions regulate the trade-offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio-cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off-farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market-based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio-ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use regulations are a critical component of forest governance and conservation strategies, but their effectiveness in shaping landholder behaviour is poorly understood. We conducted a spatial and temporal analysis of the Brazilian ForestCode (BFC) to understand the patterns of regulatory compliance over time and across changes in the policy, and the implications of these compliance patterns for the perceived costs to landholders and environmental performance of agricultural landscapes in the southern Amazon state of Mato Grosso. Landholdings tended to remain in compliance or not according to their status at the beginning of the study period. The perceived economic burden of BFC compliance on soya bean and beef producers (US$3-5.6 billion in net present value of the land)may in part explain themassive, successful campaign launched by the farm lobby to change the BFC. The ecological benefits of compliance (e.g. greater connectivity and carbon) with the BFC are diffuse and do not compete effectively with the economic benefits of non-compliance that are perceived by landholders. Volatile regulation of land-use decisions that affect billions in economic rent that could be captured is an inadequate forest governance instrument; effectiveness of such regulations may increase when implemented in tandem with positive incentives for forest conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian government has promoted development in Amazonia for over forty years. Nevertheless, improvement of rural conditions has been limited. Although tropical deforestation has been the premier concern in discussions about Amazonia, this article focuses instead on the human dimensions of development and the apparent failings of social policy in the region. In so doing, the article argues that what we observe today represents the consequence of conflicting development strategies, brought about by shifting national priorities that were influenced, in part, by international pressures. The article makes this argument by first presenting an overview of development strategies pursued since the mid-twentieth century, followed by a description of shifting national priorities linked to pressures from the international community regarding indigenous rights and environmental concern. Finally, this article presents a GISbased case study focused on the state of Pará, demonstrating the spatial articulation of contradictory policies and showing the overlap and conflict between competing interests. These spaces of conflict are supported by actual accounts of disputes at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the creation of extractive reserves in Brazil that grants legal protection to forest land traditionally used by rubber tappers, Brazil-nut gatherers and others. Number of extractive reserves established in one of Brazil's states most threatened by deforestation; Value to rubber tappers; Sustainable harvest versus deforestation; Economic value of extractive products; Extractive products for the future; Beyond cost-benefit analysis; Forest justification; Forest maintenance as a constraint on development.