Land Tenure Regularization Policy and Enforcement in Pará environmental compliance: a case study (original) (raw)
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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 spatiallyexplicit 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.
2015
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
New trends in land tenure and environmental regularisation laws in the Brazilian Amazon
Regional Environmental Change, 2017
The main challenge on Brazil’s environmental agenda today is illegal deforestation in the Amazon, which to a large extent is a result of the state being unable to fully control the use of its natural resources. To improve the situation, new pieces of legislation have been enacted, but not as part of an integrated policy for the region. This article analyses the legal evolution of land tenure laws and environmental regularisation laws enacted to reduce illegal deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The study of the legislation discussed here uses the legal interpretative method. The primary sources used in the analysis are legal documents, combined with state and non-governmental organisations’ reports on land regularisation and environmental implementation programmes in the region. It concludes that although land tenure and environmental regularisation were designed to be applied independently, agrarian activities have always been subject to environmental regulations. Recent deforestation monitoring indicates that deforestation rates are lower in areas that were subject to land tenure regularisation. For this reason, the strategy of the Brazilian Government since 2016 has been to formally integrate both regularisation activities through legal and policy modifications
LAND USE REGULATIONS IN THE STATE OF PARÁ, BRAZIL: AN OVERVIEW OF ITS GUIDELINES
In: Gehard Gerold et al. (Eds.. (Org.). Interdisciplinary analysis and modeling of carbon-optimized land management strategies for Southern Amazonia. 1aed.Gottingen: Univertiatsverlag Gottingen., 2014
This essay presents the guidelines of ITERPA’s land tenure regularization program in Pará as well as the Federal Government’s land tenure regularization program. It also indicates the existing major problems related to ownership rights and occupation of public lands in Brazilian Amazonia. It presents which legal and administrative changes took place in order to implement these programs.
2015
Appropriation of public lands associated with agricultural frontier expansion is a longstanding occurrence in the Amazon that has resulted in a highly skewed land-tenure structure in spite of recent state efforts to recognize tenure rights of indigenous people and smallholders living in or nearby forests. Growing concerns to reduce environmental impacts from agricultural development have motivated state governments to place greater attention on sustainable land management and forest conservation. This paper assesses the political and institutional conditions shaping tenure security and land appropriation in lowland Bolivia and the State of Pará in Brazil, and their links with environmental governance. The two cases show that clarifying and securing tenure rights is considered as the cornerstone for improving environmental governance. Thus, much attention has been given to the recognition of indigenous people and smallholder rights and to legalization of large-scale estates in agricultural frontiers, which have in turn influenced emerging conservation and environmental governance approaches. While policy frameworks share similar goals in the two cases, contrasting implementation approaches have been adopted: more agrarian in lowland Bolivia and more conservationist in the State of Pará.
Appropriation of public lands associated with agricultural frontier expansion is a longstanding occurrence in the Amazon that has resulted in a highly skewed land-tenure structure in spite of recent state efforts to recognize tenure rights of indigenous people and smallholders living in or nearby forests. Growing concerns to reduce environmental impacts from agricultural development have motivated state governments to place greater attention on sustainable land management and forest conservation. This paper assesses the political and institutional conditions shaping tenure security and land appropriation in lowland Bolivia and the State of Pará in Brazil, and their links with environmental governance. The two cases show that clarifying and securing tenure rights is considered as the cornerstone for improving environmental governance. Thus, much attention has been given to the recognition of indigenous people and smallholder rights and to legalization of large-scale estates in agricultural frontiers, which have in turn influenced emerging conservation and environmental governance approaches. While policy frameworks share similar goals in the two cases, contrasting implementation approaches have been adopted: more agrarian in lowland Bolivia and more conservationist in the State of Pará.
Land appropriation of public lands, either by large-and small-scale landholders, associated with agricultural frontier expansion is a longstanding occurrence in the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon. The appropriation of public lands has resulted in a highly skewed land tenure distribution in spite of recent state efforts to recognize the tenure rights of smallholders and indigenous people living in or nearby the forests. Large-scale land appropriation by individual landholders and corporate actors has often taken place in the Amazon through the displacement of local populations, the encroachment of public lands and through shadow market transactions. In this context, smallholders have struggled in order to compete with corporate actors in accessing public lands, and to secure those rights over time. The latter is also the main challenge facing indigenous people in their attempts to exclude third-parties from their territories. This paper assesses the historical roots of land appropriation in the Amazon, and the political and institutional conditions shaping that process. Then, it evaluates contrasting contemporary tenure reforms in lowland Bolivia and the State of Pará, Brazil. Main focus is to understand the outcomes from land regularization and formalization of tenure rights and their social and environmental implications. Main outcomes have been the formal recognition of community lands under relatively constrained tenure rights, legalization of large-scale estates in agricultural and forests frontiers, and slow down of small-scale agriculture expansion given the difficulty that states face to more aggressively promote land redistribution. This has brought new challenges for devising ways to promote sustainable and equitable development with conservation in the Amazon. In addition, governments have put in place somehow contradictory efforts to support communities and smallholders, on the one hand, and the agribusiness and cattle beef sector on the other, which has led to reinforce the tensions between ambivalent policy agendas.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017
Since 2004, annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen nearly 80 percent, even as agricultural production in the region has increased. Understanding this land use transition requires a theorization of the relationships among environmental governance, agricultural intensification, and state building. Drawing on key informant interviews, municipal-level case studies, and an organizational ethnography of an international environmental organization, I argue that declines in deforestation engineered by new governance arrangements are part of a project of economic development and state building through environmental regulation. This project is implemented by a complex of government, nongovernmental, and corporate actors. I describe the emergence of this complex and the land sparing logic that animates it. Land sparing policy inverts previous logics of state territorialization and environmental conservation with the aim of shifting the Amazonian economy from an extensive mode of extraction to an intensive mode of production. Two municipal case studies follow variation in land sparing policy implementation. The cases identify determinants of land sparing policy effectiveness and collateral effects, including tendencies toward agro-industrial consolidation at the expense of smallholders.
Vibrant, 2020
This article examines how in the past two decades development standards have been established for the Amazon based on both strengthening environmental governance and expanding agriculture. It describes how the process of construction in time of an ambiguous development policy model for the Amazon, which has oscillated between territorial management based on a "green agenda" perspective and investment in policies that favored territorial security of land occupancy implemented through changes in laws and regulations concerning the environment and land ownership. Finally, I emphasize the recent convergence of interests of international cooperation, the state and agribusiness around public policies for environmental regulation based on a perspective of harmonious conviviality and positive and systemic alignment between the economy and the environment.