Tackling Deforestation at Subnational Scales in the Brazilian Amazon: Diverse Municipalities, Agents, and the Struggle for Collective Action in a Moving Frontier

Abstract

The Brazilian Amazon is a mosaic of social-cultural and environmental realities, urban and rural. Home to 28 million people living across hundreds of municipalities, the region has been the stage for conflicting narratives and demands over conservation and development. How do agents across diverse municipalities respond to national anti-deforestation policies in the Amazon? This dissertation examined the development of the Brazilian forest legislation, the trajectory of colonization, territorial occupation, and development of Amazonian municipalities, and the implications of one emblematic national antideforestation policy targeting municipalities along the region’s expanding frontier: the List of Priority Municipalities (LPM). The LPM policy has imposed tough sanctions on municipalities considered hotspots of deforestation, being considered innovative for requiring both individual and collective actions to curtail deforestation. This research adopted a social-ecological systems’ perspective, drawing upon the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to guide systematic data collection, integration, and analysis. Mixed methods were combined to analyze archival documents, geospatial and official secondary datasets compiled for 530 municipalities in the Amazon biome, and in-depth case studies and interviews with diverse stakeholders. That provided complementary evidence to the multi-spatial and temporal analysis of three questions. First, the dissertation drew upon archival research and past forest regulations to ask how narratives and values about forests have evolved. Second, it compiled official secondary data at the municipal level and used logistic regression models to inquiry about the factors and local attributes affecting compliance with the LPM policy. Third, the research combined multivariate analysis and indepth case studies to examine interactions both between the geographical context of listed municipalities and within the region’s moving frontier, as well as to analyze factors underlying collaboration among local agents. Findings show that forest legislation and narratives about the value of forests have expanded in scope, resulting in more stringent and comprehensive regulations. However, interest groups have recurrently contested the societal value of forests, undermining forest regulations that threaten sectoral activities. Further, results revealed that historical-geographical factors defined municipal attributes and conditions across the moving frontier that have either facilitated or hindered local responses to LPM sanctions. The location of municipalities in areas undergoing different phases of occupation and transformation significantly affected the ability of local agents and municipal governments to comply with policy criteria applied similarly across the region. The analysis highlights the importance of strengthening law enforcement and municipal environmental governance, and the relevance of inter-institutional cooperation among governments, markets, and civil organizations. The study shows both challenges and opportunities for balancing regional development and forest conservation through collaboration among diverse groups of agents and levels of governance.