Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Groups, Networks and the Political Economy of Rainforest Destruction in Brazil (original) (raw)
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IT'S ALL ABOUT POWER:. The Political Economy and Ecology of Redefining the Brazilian Amazon
The Sociological Quarterly, 1999
What happens to rural communities in remote raw materials-rich regions when their definitions of the region's natural resources are confronted with competing and incompatible definitions presented and enforced by external actors? The social constructionist approach in environmental sociology provides an essential counterbalance to environmental determinism, but this article argues that in many contexts social construction is actually a process of the imposition of external actors' material interests over the objections of local groups. New historical materialism, via an interdisciplinary and multimethod research strategy, analyzes the changing definitions and uses of the Brazilian Amazon as a revelatory case study of the political economy and ecology of this process and its consequences for nature, rural communities, and indigenous peoples.
Government support for, and indigenous resistance to, development based on the exploitation of natural resources, has become a common source of conflict across the developing world. An investigation of such conflicts within the Brazilian Amazon, beginning with the Empate movement and Chico Mendez, reveals the interdependencies of indigenous and environmental activists with the same globalising forces and processes they aim to resist. Reliance on communication and information technologies, and support from international civil society networks constrains the capacity for grassroots resistance movements to press for the systemic changes required to reduce extractive demands and create alternative pathways for socio-economic development.
e-cadernos CES, 2015
Indigenous communities' participation in environmental politics of dam projects in the Brazilian Amazon is marked by an ambivalent effect. On one hand, there is the local political economy regulated by traditional systems; on the other hand, there is the global political procedure addressed to 'empower' indigenous institutions in their interactions with corporate and governmental actors. Yet, when this second juridical instance is dominated by suspicion, due not only to the lack of execution of environmental compensating measures, but mainly to the lack of space where indigenous principles could be taken into account, official political systems are frequently undermined by local forms of representation, personified in the image of the 'indigenous warrior'. This article seeks to reveal how the enactment of the warrior in Brazilian public life ends up redefining ethnic agency, not as a remaining cultural trait of a particular symbolic economy, but as crime.
Journal of Sustainable Development, 2009
Deforestation in the tropics accounts for one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. For this reason, the preservation of remaining tropical forests is an integral component of any international climate change mitigation policy. Indigenous peoples are crucial actors for the success of such a policy given the large amount of forestland in indigenous hands, their historical and cultural role in the management of forests, and their relative success at sustainable forest stewardship. The aim of this research is to contribute to the academic literature and to the ongoing international debate over a mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), scheduled to culminate in December 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. This article aims to answer the question: What will be the effects on indigenous peoples in Brazil of an international policy mechanism for REDD? It draws upon research conducted using a qualitative prospective policy evaluation method to describe the possible risks and opportunities to indigenous peoples and to make recommendations for improving REDD on the variables of scope, financing, and the process of negotiation and governance. Although the article concentrates on the effects of a REDD policy on indigenous peoples in Brazil given its status as a leading-edge case on this issue, it aspires to offer lessons for the other countries of the Amazon basin.
Schmink Wood 1987 The Political Ecology of Amazonia 1
The growing concern over the negative environmental impact of recent expansion of population and economic activity into the Brazilian Amazon basin has raised important questions about the relationship between the natural environment and socioeconomic behavior. Fiscal policies designed to attract the expertise of private firms to the Amazon region have induced rampant land speculation and the rapid expansion of unproductive pastures rather than the expected "rational" use of natural resources. Small-farmer colonization schemes, plagued by institutional failures and market bottle necb, have been unable to absorb a significant portion of the Brazilian migrants seeking to settle the region. Land titling procedures remain confused, and, as a result, ranchers, squatters, and miners use indiscriminate forest removal as a means to assert their claims. The increasing rate of deforestation in Brazil is especially worrisome in light of the importance of tropical forests as a source of biological diversity and of potentially useful products. Persistent violence and conflicts over land, and a growing pattern of concentration of landholdings, have repeatedly required military intervention to prevent open warfare. Indigenous groups and other long-standing inhabitants of the region have ~n on the losing side of most of these confrontations. Not only are their lands being taken away, but their well-adapted resource management strategies have ~n ignored by development planners. Attempts to protect indigenous groups and to preserve portions of the forest from intrusion have met with modest success in Brazil. At the same time, continued frontier expansion poses a formidable challenge to those who seek to minimize the disruption of the Amazonian ecosystem. Why have so many development plans and protective environmental efforts gone awry? We 'can begin to answer this question by noting that the goals of environmental policy (conservation and long-term sustainability) are fun damentally at odds with the goals of expanded production and short-term accumulation. Unmitigated ecological disasters are often hailed as resounding economic and political successes. By the same token, such resource man 38 " Tht "Political Ecology· of Amazonia 39 agement projects as conservation efforts that strictly "quarantine" the natural environment, thereby depriving people of economic sustenance and busi nesses of profit, may entail unacceptable, and potentially disruptive, social and political costs. In the socioeconomic and political context within which resource man agement projects must be carried out, the principle of private profit and expanded production far outweighs that of biophysical sustainability and environmental conservation. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the goals of ecologically sound projects premised on assumptions, of sustainability are consistently subverted by the mechanics of a social system based on the laws of accumulation. It follows, also, that explanations for this "subversion" cannot be attributed solely to the familiar list of factors: insufficient knowledge and technical training, poorly informed public policy, the self-interest of particular social groups, population increase, and so on. Although these considerations are certainly relevant to project failure, they are themselves the result of much broader phenomena. As we will argue in this chapter, a society's prevailing form of economic production and class structure, and the manner in which diverse economic groups battle for ideological and policy advantage within the state apparatus, are crucial, considerations in the process of designing resource management projects and in formulating strategies to carry them out. In the first section we present a model of the sociopolitical system that can be used to analyze the processes pertinent to understanding the human use of natural resources. The framework, drawn hom the perspective of political economy, shows the relationship between surplus production, social class, the function of the state in promoting private accumulation, and the role of ideology in public discourse and development planning. In order to demonstrate the relevance of these concepts and relationships to the study of resource management, we extend the political economy framework to address the specific issue of land use patterns in the Brazilian Amazon. This approach, which we have called "political ecology," illustrates hQw economic and political processes determine the way natural resources have ~n exploited in frontier regions of northern Brazil.' The concluding section applies these insights to the practical problem of how to create programs to alter the ways in which resources are exploited. We argue that both the design of intervention projects and the strategies to implement them must be formulated on the basis of a thorough assessment of a society's overall political economy. We propose that the design of policy interventions follow an explicit agenda by which the desiderata of a proposed resource-use model (based on an assessment of both ecological and social (actors) is weighed against what can be feasibly accomplished in a giv~n setting (based on an analysis of existing resource-use systems, diHerences in socioeconomic and political power, and the conflicts and trade-offs the,e ~~ i
Thinking Politically about Sustainable Development in the Tropical Forests of Latin America
Development and Change, 1994
ABSTRACTThis article examines a number of factors which facilitate the adoption and success of policies and projects to promote grassroots sustainable development – that is, the sustainable, multiple use of forests at the community level, including aspects of local self‐reliance and control of economic resources. I will argue that the extractive reserve legislation in Brazil and community forestry projects in Mexico and Peru depended on the formation of pro‐grassroots development coalitions. The exact make‐up of those coalitions depended on three factors: (1) the initial disposition of key governmental and dominant class actors to such policies; (2) the intensity of local conflicts and the extent of community organization; and (3) the involvement of international actors. The cases suggest that in the absence of serious government or upper class opposition, the adoption and durability of such policies and projects can be promoted by the formation of a coalition of organized communiti...