Valuing conservation and socio-environmental services on an Amazon frontier

The Extractive Reserves of the Terra do Meio

Bibliographic Data

ID4301705
AuthorsRoberto Rezende (0000-0002-4059-3811, Instituto Sócioambiental, corresponding author), Gabe Schwartzman (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Jefferson Straatmann (Instituto Sócioambiental), Augusto Postigo (0000-0003-4228-8965, Instituto Sócioambiental), Augusto De Arruda Postigo (Instituto Sócioambiental)
Year2024
Volume31
Issue1
Publication date2024-01-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Political Ecology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1073-0451 • E-ISSN: 1073-0451
PublisherUniversity of Arizona (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2458/jpe.3027
OpenAlexW4389764644
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited52

In the Brazilian Amazon, forest conservation has relied on the presence of 'traditional communities' and Indigenous peoples to secure legally demarcated protected areas from deforestation and biodiversity degradation. Facing pressures for land-use change from a rapidly encroaching frontier of resource extraction and commodity production, there is no guarantee that Indigenous peoples or traditional communities will continue to occupy these forests or continue to fulfill the role of forest protectors except under certain conditions. In this article, we detail the case of the extractive reserves of the Terra do Meio and consider what conditions would be needed for traditional communities to continue to occupy and protect protected areas. Employing an agrarian political ecology approach, we draw on years of ethnographic research in this area to argue that forest peasant livelihoods, which revolve around the forest areas of use, produce both ecological and cultural diversity in the forest. We term this socio-ecological arrangement the productive system of the colocação, the system and geographies of forest peasant livelihoods that upholds and is upheld by diverse socio-ecological relationships. Contemporary forest conservation regimes, however, have largely failed to incentivize and value these forest peasant livelihoods in ways that would sustain them in the face of commoditizing frontier pressures. Any mechanisms that pay for forest conservation should remunerate communities for their entire socio-ecological relationships, those relationships that are upheld through forest peasant livelihoods, not simply their products. We propose an approach to valuing forest communities' socio-environmental services, and we argue that such valuation would be more effective for conservation and cultural/ecological diversity than existing proposals for payments for ecosystem services (PES

Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Chemistry · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Land Use and Ecosystem Services

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