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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. 

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse.