The intertemporal governance challenges of Brazil’s Amazon: managing soybean expansion, deforestation rates, and urban floods

Abstract

The Brazilian Amazon faces three dominant governance challenges that have become increasingly interconnected over time and now affect each other: managing agricultural expansion, reducing deforestation, and mitigating urban floods. This region exemplifies that the governance of one social-ecological system (SES) in the Anthropocene can no longer be thought of in isolation of others because, together, they form a complex network of flows and spillovers to manage. Studying the interconnection of different decision-making areas, however, calls for an intertemporal examination of governance that integrates different methodological approaches. We use the Network of Adjacent Action Situations (NAS), Combined IAD-SES (CIS) framework, and the telecoupling framework to study these three interrelated processes in the Amazon. Employing mixed-methods research, including fieldwork covering each of these processes, we demonstrate how the governance of multiple SESs represents an intertemporal governance challenge. Our paper contributes to the SES governance and NAS literature by linking governance issues generally looked at separately and offering an understanding of the governance connections between telecoupled processes. Beyond its contribution to Brazilian Amazon governance, this paper offers an integrated framework that may be useful to study the interconnection of governance of NAS in other places.