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Policy Brief: The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability. This brief 1) identifies the key factors that enable these place-based initiatives to achieve successful social-ecological outcomes and 2) suggests policies to better support these grassroots efforts in addressing environmental and social challenges in the region, such as: • Promoting policies that prioritize and empower local grassroots leadership in sustainability initiatives. • Encouraging diversification in activities and partnerships to increase resilience and impact. • Promoting collaboration across different governance levels and sectors to support sustainability efforts.
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Place-based solutions for global social-ecological dilemmas: An analysis of locally grounded, diversified, and cross-scalar initiatives in the Amazon
The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability and the factors that explain their success remain understudied. To address this gap, this paper proposes that local initiatives that pursue three particular pathways are more likely to generate improvements in social-ecological outcomes: (1) maintaining close connections with local grassroots, (2) pursuing diversity in productive activities performed and partnership choices, and (3) developing cross-scale collaborations. To test these ideas we collected and analyzed observations of 157 initiatives in Brazil and Peru, applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our results show that initiatives maintaining groundedness in representing the interests and concerns of local actors while partnering with other organizations at multiple scales are more likely to develop joint solutions to social-ecological problems. Partnerships and support from external organizations may strengthen and enhance local capabilities, providing a platform for negotiating interests and finding common ground. Such diversified pathways demonstrate the power of local actors to transcend their own territories and have broader impacts in sustainability objectives. Our findings highlight the need to make governmental and non-governmental support (e.g., financial, technical, political) available according to local needs to enable local initiatives’ own ways of addressing global environmental change.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2403834
- PAR ID:
- 10515252
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Global Environmental Change
- Volume:
- 82
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0959-3780
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102718
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102718
