The place of place-based actions for sustainability in Amazonia

This presentation provides an overview of recent and ongoing research on the emergence and experiences of place-based initiatives advancing social and environmental goals in the Brazilian Amazon. While the eyes of the world have followed the accelerated and destructive transformation of Amazonia, another remarkable, yet largely invisible, transformation has been taking place around the region. During recent decades, initiatives by rural and indigenous communities, organizations, and collaborative networks have emerged throughout Amazonia. These initiatives focus on myriad issues: rights and governance of land and natural resources, production system transitions, value-aggregation, associativism and cooperativism, gender and youth inclusion, biodiversity restoration, food security, health, and beyond. Increasingly, they have become key players in local and regional environmental governance, public goods provisioning, employment opportunities, and the regional economy. These efforts are up against tremendous socioeconomic, infrastructural, political, and climate change challenges, to which they often respond through innovative institutional arrangements, new alliances and partnerships, but in many cases struggle to endure. The presentation will provide a historical context to these initiatives and reflect on the extent to which place-based initiatives can be sustained and amplified in a conflictive and changing regional context. I will discuss the possible role of emergent alliances and partnership between community, public, and private sectors and their role in addressing common problems and to leverage new opportunities to promote just sustainability in Amazonia.

About the speaker:

Eduardo S. Brondizio, Indiana University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology
Member, National Academies of Science
2023 Volvo Environmental Prize Laureate

Eduardo S. Brondizio is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Directs the Center for the Analysis of Social-Ecological Landscapes, and Senior Fellow at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University-Bloomington. Brondizio holds external professorship with the Environment and Society program at the University of Campinas, Brazil. For over three decades, Brondizio’s work has documented, examined, and responded to the social-environmental transformation and governance challenges of Amazônia and contributed to numerous international initiatives addressing the social dimensions of and the contributions of Indigenous and local knowledge to global environmental change assessments and responses. Brondizio served as co-chair of the Global Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Brondizio is a fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, international member of the Agricultural Academy of France, and elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences. Brondizio was awarded the 2023 Volvo Environment Prize for his research examining human-environment interactions and how they’ve transformed the Amazon. The annual award recognizes those who have made outstanding scientific discoveries around sustainability. Three laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.

This event is co-hosted with the Food Systems Institute