Forest frontiers out of control: The long-term effects of discourses, policies, and markets on conservation and development of the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

With the Brazilian military governments of the 1960s, systematic economic development of the Amazon began. Social and environmental concerns have entered Amazonian discourses and policies only since the 1990s. Since then, reports of threats to forests and indigenous people have alternated with reports of socio-economic progress and environmental achievements. These contradictions often arise from limited thematic, sectoral, temporal, or spatial perspectives, and lead to misinterpretation. Our paper offers a comprehensive picture of discourses, policies, and socio-environmental dynamics for the entire region over the last five decades. We distinguish eight historical policy phases, each of which had little effect on near-linear dynamics of demographic growth and land-use expansion, although some policies showed the potential to change the course of development. To prevent local, national, and international actors from continuing to assert harmful interests in the region, a coherent long-term commitment and change in the collective mindset are needed.

Forest environmental frontiers around the globe: Old patterns and new trends in forest governance

“…First, the traditional forest frontier characterized by deforestation, forest degradation, and land use change related to agricultural expansion (but also to urban development, as for instance discussed in Kanowski and Edwards (2021)) is still important and dominates forest environmental policy conflicts especially in the tropics (Pokorny et al 2021;Brockhaus et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021). This frontier is connected to a reverse land use change frontier-the restoration frontierthat is increasingly global by nature (DeJong et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021).…”

“…Second, another key forest environmental frontier of global nature is characterized by the clashing world views and policy paradigms of nature/biodiversity conservation and forest use actors (Dobrynin et al 2021;Kanowski and Edwards 2021;Pokorny et al 2021;Sotirov et al 2021;Schultz et al 2021). Specifically, controversies between environmental/conservation and forest use (and in some regions broader land use) policy actors are characterizing the forest environmental frontier in many, if not all, world regions and are the dominant conflict pattern in several of them.…”

“…Third, conflicts related to the distribution of forest use rights between different groups of the population, for instance between different ethnicities (e.g., First Nations and today's majority populations), characterize the forest environmental frontier in several world regions, especially in the tropical world regions (Pokorny et al 2021;Ramcilovic-Suominen et al 2021) and Australia/New Zealand (Kanowski and Edwards 2021). Related to that, controversies over the best way to govern diverging demands and expectations of forests occur, marking, for instance, a frontier between formal and informal practices and ways to account for them, but also between (free) market governance and state intervention.…”

“…A classical forest frontier of global importance is the focus of the next paper by Pokorny et al (2021), which focuses on the ongoing forest transition in the Brazilian Amazon. The authors take a long-term historical perspective, starting in the 1960s.…”

“…For the latter, they investigate a set of social, economic, and environmental indicators, including deforestation rates, to trace the impacts of changing policies on the Amazon Forest and socio-economic development. While social and environmental concerns have increasingly entered the political debate since the 1990s, resulting in novel policies to conserve forests and improve livelihoods in the Amazon region, the main argument of Pokorny et al (2021) is that the long-standing patterns of deforestation caused mainly by agricultural expansion and only modest social equality gains continue. This led the authors to call for ''a coherent, long-term commitment and change in the collective mindset'', which would be needed to bring the Amazon forest frontier back ''in control''.…”