Doctoral Dissertation Research: Land Reform, Social Conflict, and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

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Tropical deforestation is a significant ongoing threat to the global and local biodiversity, climate, and human and environmental sustainability. Explanations of land-cover and land-use change, and particularly deforestation, have been legion, but most approaches to the issue have neglected the potential contributions of group mobilization. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the environmental effects of the mobilization of the landless poor in the eastern Brazilian Amazon in an area commonly referred to as the South of Para. The landless movement, a loose union of many individual movements, seeks to force the Brazilian government to expropriate private property by citing constitutional law that provides for the redistribution of "unproductive," forested land. Using interviews with government officials and private property owners, remote sensing, and geographic information systems, this study is expected to uncover (1) the selection criteria of landless movement land occupations and (2) the actions large property owners take to avoid the expropriation of their property. These findings may be used to help redefine the currently de facto status of Brazil's land-reform program in order to reduce social conflict and environmental impact as well as to suggest new strategies to diffuse land-related conflict and environmental harm in other regions. The investigators expect to show that large property owners deforest their property preemptively to avoid state-led expropriation and actions against them by the landless movement and that the landless movement has a very well-defined strategy for the targeting of land-reform activity.This project will describe the environmental change resulting from the contentious interaction between a social movement and local elites. As this interaction unfolds, both sides negatively impact the environment through the substitution of pasture and other agriculture for forest cover, an activity long recognized as unsustainable and only marginally profitable in many parts of the world. As agriculture continues to change throughout the world, and land resources become more scarce, land-related conflict is set to become an increasingly common problem. This dissertation research will provide insights regarding how actors on both sides of land conflict behave. These insights may provide a good basis for land reform and environmental policy in the study area and beyond. In a wider sense, this research may also contribute to basic knowledge about how people decide to use and modify their environments and how political and social interactions define local ecology. The project may also further theoretical formulations of how land-cover and land-use changes occur. Finally, this Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award will provide a dedicated student the support to conduct extended, independent research in preparation for a strong research career.