Collaborative Research: Contentious Land Change in the Eastern Amazon

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Land-change research has identified a number of factors that influence deforestation and forest fragmentation, including fiscal incentives, infrastructure development, migration, and household processes. This research project will expand the explanatory power of land-change research by considering a factor that has not been adequately studied, namely social processes stemming from unequal access to land resources. The project's investigators will broaden the concept of land-change agency or responsibility, often deployed uncritically in land-change research, by considering social actions and reactions occurring over decadal time periods and by actors who do not always behave in economically "rational" ways. The researchers will develop a comprehensive perspective on land change for southeastern Para state of northern Brazil, a laboratory and battleground for myriad Amazonian development initiatives. To characterize land change between 1984 and 2010, including deforestation, reforestation, and forest patch dynamics, the researchers will employ remote sensing and landscape ecology techniques. To examine the social process aspects of land change, especially contention over land, they will conduct a thorough news media analysis covering more than 5,000 news accounts of conflict. They will complement this archival research with field interviews and intensive case-studies involving at least five landowners and many local key informants. By mixing field interviews with remote sensing and landscape ecology, the researchers will treat Amazonian land change as an integrated system of processes, not just a singular process of deforestation driven by "rational" economic decisions. The investigators expect to find that properties that play host to contention displayed greater overall deforestation and increased (or different) forest fragmentation patterns than for properties that were not contested. The researchers will seek to ascertain whether contention has led to a forest structure shift, creating a more complex forest landscape with negative implications for the region's ecology.This project will reframe land change in the study area as a process occurring within a context of social contention, and it will shed light on how social processes and multiple, sometimes simultaneous, land managers affect land change. The project will help extend accepted theories and perspectives in land-change science, specifically responding to recent calls for opening behavior-based explanations of land change to the influences of social processes and power relations. By evaluating the environmental implications of land conflict, the project will shed light on how conflict could affect the contribution of tropical deforestation to global climate change. It will provide new perspectives for evaluating initiatives to reduce deforestation via the UN's REDD program and have policy relevance in many other nations. By adopting an active learning paradigm, students will study complex issues of societal import in all their "real world" messiness in undergraduate courses in the U.S. and Brazil.