SUMMARY Government policies are needed when people’s behaviors fail to deliver the public good. Those policies will be most effective if they can stimulate long-term changes in beliefs and norms, creating and reinforcing the behaviors needed to solidify and extend the public good.It is often the short-term acceptability of potential policies, rather than their longer-term efficacy, that determines their scope and deployment. The policy process should consider both time scales. The academy, however, has provided insufficient insight on the coevolution of social norms and different policy instruments, thus compromising the capacity of decision makers to craft effective solutions to the society’s most intractable environmental problems. Life scientists could make fundamental contributions to this agenda through targeted research on the emergence of social norms.

In this paper we examine land reform policies and their implications for violent conflict over land and resource use in the Brazilian Amazon. We identify the protagonists (land owners and squatters), derive their incentives to use violence, and show the role of legal inconsistencies as a basis for conflict. Although civil law guarantees title for land owners, the Brazilian Constitution adds a beneficial use criterion as a condition for title enforcement. This provision is part of a land reform or redistribution effort and it provides authorization for transfers to squatters. We describe the government agency involved in land reform, INCRA, and show that its intervention critically affects the actions of both squatters and land owners. Further, we point out the resource use effects of land reform policies and associated insecure property rights to land. Forested lands on large farms do not meet the constitutional beneficial use criterion and hence, are vulnerable to invasion by squatters and redistribution by INCRA. In the contest for control, land owners and squatters have incentives to deforest more rapidly and extensively prior to a conflict than agricultural production alone would warrant in order to demonstrate their respective land use. In analyzing the determinants of violent conflict, an analytical framework is provided to generate hypotheses for testing. Using data from the Brazilian census and the Pastoral Land Commission for the state of Para we examine the characteristics of regions where violent conflict predominates. Our empirical results indicate that a greater policy emphasis on land reform in Brazil through expropriation to reduce violent conflict, may have the unanticipated effect of increasing violent competition and wasteful resource use. The results of the paper are suggestive not only for Brazil, but for elsewhere in Latin America where there is tension between the goals of secure property rights and wealth redistribution.

We give special thanks to the research assistance and comments provided by James Dalen, Jr., Jeffrey Fuller, Bernardo Mueller, and Ricardo Tarifa. We benefitted from lengthy comments provided by Ron Oaxaca and Pablo Spiller. We also received helpful suggestions from Ann Carlos, Linda Cohen, Gershon Feder, Price Fishback, Doc Ghose, Shawn Kantor, Larry Neal, Barbara Sands, Leslie Stratton, Les Taylor, the referees, and participants at seminars at Clemson University; University of California-Berkeley; University of California-Riverside; Utah State University; Conference on the Use of Quantitative Methods in Canadian Economic History, University of Western Ontario, October 1995; University of Colorado; Colorado School of Mines; University of Illinois; University of Michigan; Northwestern University; University of Washington; and Economic History Association Meetings, Tucson, September 1993. We acknowledge gratefully the financial assistance provided by the National Science Foundation grants SES 92113603 and SBR 9512107 and The World Bank. This paper is part of NBER's research program in the Development of the American Economy. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.© 1996 by Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap and Robert Schneider. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. suggests that researchers must pay special attention to the complex political process by which property rights are assigned in studying the emergence of tenure institutions.

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