The Fire Management Dilemma in the Brazilian Amazon: Synthesizing Pathways of Causality across Five Case Studies in the State of Pará

Abstract

Communities of fire-dependent smallholders in the Amazon face a number of problems associated with fire management norms. We investigate potential causal factors and mechanisms enabling and disabling solutions to these problems through an analysis of five case studies of Amazon communities in the Brazilian state of Para using two concepts from Ostrom’s (1990) framework for the study of self-governance of common-pool resources: the three main self-governance problems (supply of governance norms, compliance with norms, and monitoring and sanctioning of compliance), and the notion of individual rational action as based in expected net benefit, internal norms, and discount rate. We detail 15 mechanisms through which individual similarity, external intervention, community turnover, and market access influence fire management. Our results suggest the need to include communities in fire policy design, to coordinate with NGOs, to prioritize support on monitoring and sanctioning, to control integration of communities to the land market, and to target integrated fire management.