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

Marie-Gabrielle Piketty,François Laurent,Marcelo Thâles,Emilie Coudel,Sophie Plassin,René Poccard-Chapuis,Isabel Drigo

doi:10.3390/f6051516

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 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.

Highlights

Land use governance in the Brazilian Amazon has undergone significant changes in the last decade.The globalization of the Amazon soy and beef industries have made these sectors more vulnerable to international challenges while at the same time it has created new opportunities for large-scale forest conservation [1]
To investigate the potential effect of the emerging multi-level governance mechanisms on the land use transition, we focused our study on the flagship municipality of Paragominas
These results show that land use diversification is more closely linked with the quality of the soil and logistics than during the previous period, which saw the expansion of cattle ranching

Summary

Introduction

Land use governance in the Brazilian Amazon has undergone significant changes in the last decade.The globalization of the Amazon soy and beef industries have made these sectors more vulnerable to international challenges while at the same time it has created new opportunities for large-scale forest conservation [1]. One example is the soy moratorium signed by the major soy buyers forbidding them to trade soybean planted in areas deforested after 24th July 2006 This has been successfully monitored and renewed since 2007 [2,3]. Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAM I and II), implemented between 2004 and 2011, increased the national enforcement capacity, based on the real time detection of deforestation program (DETER). The national environmental enforcement agency (IBAMA) publicized operations such as the confiscation of large volumes of illegal logs or heads of cattle [4], increased controls in municipalities with higher deforestation rate [5] and embargoed properties with illegal deforestation [6,7]

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion