Dissertation Research--Highway Paving, Governance and Deforestation in the Brazilian State of Acre

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While the construction of new roads promises to improve access to goods and services among previously isolated rural and urban communities, it also can bring about negative environmental and social consequences, including deforestation and the displacement of rural smallholders under pressure from external colonization and land-speculation. Development theorists debate the capacity of governance to prevent these potential repercussions from highway paving. This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropologist will combine spatial and ethnographic techniques to study the relationships between road paving, governance and land use in Acre, Brazil. Through the use of remote sensing methods, the project will demonstrate how satellite imagery can be combined with ethnographic research. The field of political-ecology generally aims to link political-economic processes and environmental change, yet is often better equipped to explain the political-economic than the environmental side of this relationship. The research project will demonstrate ways in which remote sensing can help to overcome this imbalance, allowing political-ecologists to better account for and measure environmental change in the research process.Broader Impacts: deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has stemmed largely from government investments and incentives. This research asks whether new government policies and programs aimed at stemming deforestation can counteract previous and continuing programs that have promoted it. If the project finds this to be true along Acre's Trans-Oceanic Highway, it will support arguments that frontier governance can be an effective way to manage land use and land cover change in highway corridors. If the research fails to find a relationship between governance and sustainable land use, it will support counter arguments against governance as an effective means of managing land use change. In this case, the research would support either the argument to halt road paving in the Brazilian Amazon or, more realistically, to invest in new strategies to manage land use change along paved roadways. In any case the new knowledge will be useful for development planners. In addition the project supports the education of a young social scientist.