Multi-level Governance of Land Use Changes in the Brazilian Amazon: Lessons from Paragominas, State of Pará

Abstract

Land use governance in the Brazilian Amazon has undergone significant changes in the last decade. At the national level, law enforcement capacity has increased and downstream industries linked to commodity chains responsible for deforestation have begun to monitor some of their suppliers' impacts on forests. At the municipal level, local actors have launched a Green Municipality initiative, aimed at eliminating deforestation and supporting green supply chains at the territorial level. In this paper, we analyze the land use transition since 2001 in Paragominas-the first Green Municipality-and discuss the limits of the governance arrangements underpinning these changes. Our work draws on a spatially OPEN ACCESSForests 2015, 6 1517 explicit analysis of biophysical variables and qualitative information collected in interviews with key private and public stakeholders of the main commodity chains operating in the region. We argue that, up to now, the emerging multi-level scheme of land governance has not succeeded in promoting large-scale land use intensification, reforestation and rehabilitation of degraded lands. Moreover, private governance mechanisms based on improved product standards, fail to benefit from potential successful partnerships between the public and private sector at the territorial level. We propose a governance approach that adopts a broader territorial focus as a way forward.

Agricultural Productivity and Forest Conservation: Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon

“…15 PL municipalities signed agreements with national and international donors (including the European Commission, the Fundo Vale, and the Amazon fund), as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; including The Nature Conservancy, Instituto Centro da Vida, and Imazon ;Sassaki 2014;MMA 2015;Sills et al 2015b). While in some cases these agreements included commitments to foster sustainable agricultural practices, in practice these efforts were smallscale (Piketty et al 2015;zu Ermgassen et al 2018), and municipalities had a far stronger emphasis on measures directly related to the conditions for being removed from the PLreducing deforestation and supporting the municipalities in regularizing land use (Thaler 2017).…”

Neoliberalism and the Emergence of Private Sustainability Initiatives: The Case of the Brazilian Cattle Value Chain

“…A large part of the residual deforestation pertains to the least capitalized small-scale farms, for whom public action has little to offer in terms of alternatives. These findings call for a redefinition of the issue of sustainability in a broader perspective, one that looks beyond the sole problem of deforestation, in order to design public action that reinserts the marginalized smallholder in the rural development project and enables a transition to sustainable land use, as other authors have already pointed out (Piketty et al, 2015).…”

Cumulative disturbances to assess forest degradation using spectral unmixing in the northeastern Amazon

“…The dynamics of forest disturbances at the municipal scale also revealed marked differences in deforestation dynamics. In Paragominas, deforestation decreased from 334 km² in 2005 to an average annual deforestation of 33 km² over the period 2010 to 2015 (source: PRODES database, INPE), due to the stricter application of the Forest Code and the Green Municipality commitment (Laurent et al., ; Piketty et al., ). However, the remaining primary forests are undergoing degradation that is affecting a larger area than deforestation.…”

“…The most prevalent soils are Ferralsols, clayey on the plateaus and sandy in the valleys (Laurent, Poccard‐Chapuis, Plassin, & Pimentel Martinez, ). The natural vegetation is a dense tropical moist forest, but 45% of the study area has been deforested since the 1960s (INPE, ), mainly for cattle farming, and since the 2000s for soybean and maize cropping (Piketty et al., ). The forests have been degraded by the extraction of timber and charcoal production.…”