Sustainability and Land tenure: Who owns the floodplain in the Pantanal, Brazil?

Abstract

In seeking to achieve poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, public policy has often centred on guaranteeing land titles to local peoples. However, such approaches have brought unintended outcomes, replacing small-scale economies and natural areas by intensive exploitation of resources with no clear improvement in local people's wellbeing. To understand this, we go beyond a general political ecology framing to consider relations between sustainability and land tenure, focusing on the intersection of economics, ecology and anthropology to understand how land tenure, property and use play out on the ground. We draw together different concepts including bundle of rights, de facto and de jure resource use, property regimes, density-dependence and non-equilibrium theory. The significance of this threediscipline view is illustrated through a case study of the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, where conservationists, the government and the local population contest ownership of the Paraguay River floodplain. Government sought to address conflicts around tenure and access through a narrow view of property, which failed to encompass the overlapping layers of land tenure, property and use on the ground and only served to create further legal battles. This article concludes that a more complex view combining the three perspectives is needed in the case of the Pantanal, and in other cases of contested property rights, in order to resolve conflicting claims and foster sustainability. We dissect both the power plays involved between different groups competing for control of a valuable resource, and the legal frameworks which can and should provide checks and balances in the system. The more nuanced grasp that emerges of local systems of tenure and access, of how these diverge from western property concepts, and of their environmental implications favours a better understanding of local realities, allowing for better management policy and consequently contributing more effectively towards poverty alleviation and environmental protection.Keywords: sustainability, land tenure, property, resource use, the Pantanal Highlights Conventional property systems do not map well onto unpredictable, dynamic ecosystems  Resource access and use in wetlands and semi-arid rangelands are customarily mobile  Locally-adapted resource use, not specific property regime, dictates sustainability  Economics, anthropology and ecology help address land conflict in Brazil's Pantanal

Understanding Interaction Design Challenges in Mobile Extreme Citizen Science

“…We first performed the examination of the related work with a particular emphasis on publications stemming from the selected initiatives, i.e. (Altenbuchner, 2018; E. H. Blake, 2002;Chiaravalloti, 2017aChiaravalloti, , 2017bChiaravalloti, Homewood, & Erikson, 2017;Liebenberg et al, 2017;Stevens et al, 2013Stevens et al, , 2014Vitos, 2018a;Vitos et al, 2017Vitos et al, , 2013. From our goals and the related work examination the two authors individually extracted themes that were later refined in an internal discussion, as well as in a discussion that followed the workshop where the initial outline of our work was presented Workshop at UCL, London (2018).…”

Sustainability Agenda for the Pantanal Wetland: Perspectives on a Collaborative Interface for Science, Policy, and Decision-Making

“…Also, scientists have contributed to the discussions concerning fisheries and conservation of fish resources in MT (Law no. 9794, Estado de Mato Grosso, 2012) and the creation of a Reserva de Desenvolvimento Sustenta´vel (Sustainable Development Reserve) in the Barra do São Lourenc¸o region near Corumba´, MS (Chiaravalloti, 2017b, Chiaravalloti, Homewood, & Erikson, 2017. Significantly, fisheries regulations have been based on the results from scientific research on fish population dynamics and reproductive biology (e.g., Resende et al, 1995).…”

Systematic conservation planning in floodplain fisheries: To what extent are fishers’ needs captured in prioritisation models?

“…Moreover, external and internal social changes can add more complexity to the dynamics of local use. Therefore, a spatially explicit map of a traditional territory is a snapshot of a fluid reality (Chiaravalloti et al., ). The drawbacks of defining, geographically, traditional territories are constantly debated in the scientific literature.…”

“…In the Amazon, Brightman, Fausto and Grotti () suggested that the idea of ownership or territory may be attributed to many local groups to a spirit world rather than to humans, which brings even greater doubts about the physical representation of a traditional territory. Ultimately, local people's perception of their territory is based on the combination of social ties and ecological drivers that together continually create a new reality at any given time (Chiaravalloti et al., ).…”

“…Today, around 600 people within 70 families live in the Western Border of the Pantanal (Amâncio, Amâncio, Toniazzo, Botelho & Pellegrin, 2010), clustered in three main settlements. However, the legal battles over the use of natural resources are mainly related to fishermen living on Settlement 1 (Chiaravalloti, Homewood & Erikson, 2017; Figure 1).…”