The recent 70% decline in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon suggests that it is possible to manage the advance of a vast agricultural frontier. Enforcement of laws, interventions in soy and beef supply chains, restrictions on access to credit, and expansion of protected areas appear to have contributed to this decline, as did a decline in the demand for new deforestation. The supply chain interventions that fed into this deceleration are precariously dependent on corporate risk management, and public policies have relied excessively on punitive measures. Systems for delivering positive incentives for farmers to forgo deforestation have been designed but not fully implemented. Territorial approaches to deforestation have been effective and could consolidate progress in slowing deforestation while providing a framework for addressing other important dimensions of sustainable development.

The 2012 Brazilian Forest Code governs the fate of forests and savannas on Brazil's 394 Mha of privately owned lands. The government claims that a new national land registry (SICAR), introduced under the revised law, could end illegal deforestation by greatly reducing the cost of monitoring, enforcement, and compliance. This study evaluates that potential, using data from state-level land registries (CAR) in Pará and Mato Grosso that were precursors of SICAR. Using geospatial analyses and stakeholder interviews, we quantify the impact of CAR on deforestation and forest restoration, investigating how landowners adjust their behaviors over time. Our results indicate rapid adoption of CAR, with registered properties covering a total of 57 Mha by 2013. This suggests that the financial incentives to join CAR currently exceed the costs. Registered properties initially showed lower deforestation rates than unregistered ones, but these differences varied by property size and diminished over time. Moreover, only 6% of registered producers reported taking steps to restore illegally cleared areas on their properties. Our results suggest that, from the landowner's perspective, full compliance with the Forest Code offers few economic benefits. Achieving zero illegal deforestation in this context would require the private sector to include full compliance as a market criterion, while state and federal governments develop SICAR as a de facto enforcement mechanism. These results are relevant to other tropical countries and underscore the importance of developing a policy mix that creates lasting incentives for sustainable land-use practices.deforestation | Forest Code | tropical forests | governance | Amazon

The papers in this special issue address a major challenge facing our society: feeding a population that is simultaneously growing and increasing its per capita food consumption, while preventing widespread ecological and social impoverishment in the tropics. By focusing mostly on the Amazon's most dynamic agricultural frontier, Mato Grosso, they collectively clarify some key elements of achieving more sustainable agriculture. First, stakeholders in commodity-driven agricultural Amazonian frontiers respond rapidly to multiple forces, including global markets, international pressures for sustainably produced commodities and national-, state- and municipality-level policies. These forces can encourage or discourage deforestation rate changes within a short time-period. Second, agricultural frontiers are linked systems, land-use change is linked with regional climate, forest fires, water quality and stream discharge, which in turn are linked with the well-being of human populations. Thus, land-use practices at the farm level have ecological and social repercussions far removed from it. Third, policies need to consider the full socio-economic system to identify the efficacy and consequences of possible land management strategies. Monitoring to devise suitable management approaches depends not only on tracking land-use change, but also on monitoring the regional ecological and social consequences. Mato Grosso's achievements in reducing deforestation are impressive, yet they are also fragile. The ecological and social consequences and the successes and failures of management in this region can serve as an example of possible trajectories for other commodity-driven tropical agricultural frontiers.

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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 Forest Code (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 the massive, 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.

Climate change and rapidly escalating global demand for food, fuel, fibre and feed present seemingly contradictory challenges to humanity. Can greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land-use, more than one-fourth of the global total, decline as growth in land-based production accelerates? This review examines the status of two major international initiatives that are designed to address different aspects of this challenge. REDD+ is an emerging policy framework for providing incentives to tropical nations and states that reduce their GHG emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Market transformation, best represented by agricultural commodity roundtables, seeks to exclude unsustainable farmers from commodity markets through international social and environmental standards for farmers and processors. These global initiatives could potentially become synergistically integrated through (i) a shared approach for measuring and favouring high environmental and social performance of land use across entire jurisdictions and (ii) stronger links with the domestic policies, finance and laws in the jurisdictions where agricultural expansion is moving into forests. To achieve scale, the principles of REDD+ and sustainable farming systems must be embedded in domestic low-emission rural development models capable of garnering support across multiple constituencies. We illustrate this potential with the case of Mato Grosso State in the Brazilian Amazon.

SUMMARY This article contributes to the public administration and environmental governance literature by proposing the notion of ‘institutional subversion’ as a way of describing how the strategies adopted by local actors may change and even go against the initial aims of institutional development initiatives. The article discusses the case of the system for the environmental licencing of rural properties (SLAPR), an institutional development initiative by the state government of Mato Grosso in the south‐eastern portion of the Brazilian Amazon. It will be shown that even though this initiative has earned the status of ‘best practice’ in controlling deforestation, a closer look at SLAPR reveals that it has led to contradictory outcomes. During the first 8 years of SLAPR, it had no significant impact on reducing deforestation and, in some cases, even permitted the increase of total deforestation by providing authorization for this. According to an institutional analysis of the case study, the article draws particular conclusions that could be relevant to public administrators in the region and in other countries. In particular, it is argued that by accepting the possibility of institutional subversion, public administrators may become more attentive to unexpected consequences and be able to take corrective action. Furthermore, in order to avoid institutional subversion, public administrators should integrate institutional initiatives into broader governmental, technological and economical dimensions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article documents the degree of noncompliance of soy producers in the Amazon portion of Mato Grosso with Brazil's Forest Code and addresses the importance of market demands in shifting agricultural production and land occupation towards zero deforestation. By using a sample composed of the boundaries of 9,113 properties (72.5% of soy in the region) we assessed: a) compliance with Forest Code legal reserve requirements (a percentage of the property must have its original vegetation kept undisturbed); and compared it to b) compliance with the zero deforestation criterion of the soy moratorium. We found that 82% of the sampled properties have not deforested since 2008, thus complying with the soy moratorium. However, approximately 65% out of these 82% are noncompliant with Forest Code legal reserve requirements. This situation is even worse in the Cerrado portion of Mato Grosso. Even though the soy moratorium criterion is only applicable to the Amazon biome, the Forest Code is applicable nationwide. Despite legal reserve requirements being much lower (35% of the property in the Cerrado, as opposed to 80% in the Amazon), almost 70% of sampled properties were noncompliant with the Forest Code. From this analysis we concluded that while there was a role for consumer-driven market demand for zero deforestation soy production, there is still a need (and opportunity) to implement purchasing and financing criteria to promote compliance with Forest Code requirements in regards to legal reserve deficits. We believe that if this succeeds, it will drive a process of restoration and compensation of Forest Code deficits, strengthening public policy as well as reducing economic distortions between those who have and have not complied with Forest Code requirements.