This book argues against the assumption that sustainability and environmental conservation are naturally the common goal and norm for everyone in Amazonia. This is the first book focusing on agency, reflexivity and social development to address sustainable development in the region. It discusses the importance of looking into societal dynamics in order to deal with deforestation and sustainable development policies through the ethnography of an Amazonian settlement named New Paradise. This book demystifies utopian and overtly conservationist views that depict the Amazon rainforest as a troubled paradise. Engaging with social theory of practice with particular focus on emergentist perspectives and Foucault’s analysis of ‘heterotopia’, the author shows that Amazonia is a set of settlement heterotopias in which various local and external initiatives interact to make up real, lived-in places. The settlers’ placemaking continually rearranges power and material relations while the process usually emphasises utopian developmentalist and conservationist policy intervention. This book explores in detail how, as power relations are arranged and governance reshaped, sustainable development and construction of a green society also need to become a goal for the settlers themselves. The book’s insights on the relationship between the sustainable development frameworks used in environmental policy, and ongoing societal development on the ground inform debate both within Amazonia, and in comparable communities worldwide. It also offers institutional pathways to realise new, more engaging, policy intervention for development professionals and policy makers.

The future of Brazilian Amazonia, the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, hangs in the balance. Two decades of destructive development have provoked violent struggles for control over the region's resources, with disastrous social and environmental consequences. This multi-disciplinary collection reviews past experience but focusses on the latest phase of Amazonian settlement. Chapters by leading authorities examine such issues as colonisation in the most recent frontier areas, multinational mining projects, hydro-electric schemes, and the military occupation of Brazil's borders. After demonstrating how new government and business activities have exacerbated social tensions and ecological destruction, the volume considers alternative, more sustainable strategies.

At the dawn of the 1990s, it seemed that Amazonia had become irrevocably trapped in a downward spiral of deforestation, environmental destruction and social conflict. Yet over the past ten years a more acute awareness has emerged at all levels, national and international, of the need to encourage more sustainable policies and practices. That is, measures that provide for the economic development needs of Amazonia's diverse population, while at the same time conserving and managing the region's natural resource base. At a major conference, organised in London in June 1998 by the Institute of Latin American Studies (Amazonia 2000: Development, Environment and Geopolitics), over twenty international scholars traced the evolution of this gradual shift in thinking. The present volume, based on that conference, examines past patterns of destructive resource extraction in Amazonia and, more importantly, critically analyses a series of newer initiatives that offer more sustainable options. These include, amongst others, new production strategies, such as agroforestry, innovative resource governance models such as inland fisheries co-management and agro-ecological zoning. The challenge at this critical juncture is how to integrate such policies and practices into mainstream development within Amazonia. Contributors: David Cleary, René Dreifuss, Philip Fearnside, Jessica Groenendijk, Anthony Hall, Judith Kimerling, Tom Lovejoy, Dennis Mahar, David McGrath, Emilio Moran, Darrel Posey, Nigel Smith, and Wouter Veening.

This report, prepared by the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia at the initiative of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty and supported by the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, is based on the concept of an Amazonia that exists above and beyond the world of fantasy and myth: an Amazonia of flesh and blood, of human toil, of human history, of human faces and hopes, and future human beings. It is an analysis based not only on the experiences and technologies of today"s world but also, and with greater emphasis, on the wisdom accumulated for centuries by Amazonia itself: standing Amazonia. The Amazon region has the largest area of tropical forest on the planet, and concern for its environmental deterioration extends well beyond the borders of the eight countries that form a part of it. With support from the IDB and UNDP, the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia prepared this report that provides data on the region's natural resources, population, health and infrastructure.

Sustainable development is often thought of as a product that can be obtained by following a prescribed course of interventions. Rather than conceptualizing it as a sweet spot of economic, ecological, and social balance, sustainable development is an ongoing process of embroilments requiring constant negotiation of often-competing aims. Sustainable development politics yield highly uneven results among different members of society and different geographic areas. As this book argues, such imbalances mean that sustainable development processes often prioritize economic over environmental goals, perpetuating and reinforcing economic and political inequalities. Governing the Rainforest looks at development and conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, where the government and corporate interests bump up against those of environmentalists and local populations. This book asks why sustainable development continues to be such a powerful and influential idea in the region, and what impact it has had on various political and economic interests and geographic areas. In other words, as Eve Z. Bratman argues, sustainable development is a political practice in itself. This book offers detailed case study analysis, including of the creation of vast conservation corridors, the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, and new forms of land settlement projects. Based on a decade of Bratman's ethnographic fieldwork throughout Brazil, and particularly along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Governing the Rainforest offers a fresh take on sustainable development within a multi-level analysis of actors, discourses, and practices.

Very often, the reports and commentaries come from outside the countries and peoples of the region, while much of the thinking about Amazonia from within is not widely known or accessible.