Community Cohesion and Distrust: Tracing the Roots of Resource Use and Social Equity in Maranhão, Brazil

Abstract

"A comparative examination of trajectories of two communities in the Eastern Amazon experiencing land struggles in the 1980s sheds light on factors triggering their differential resource use patterns and contrasting ways in which social relations are manifested. While in one case community institutions were able enhance local livelihoods and residents welfare, institutions regulating resource-use in the other case have failed to establish rules for a sustainable system. The examination of social relations over extended periods supports our understanding of todays socioeconomic configurations in the two communities, and their interaction with the environment. Improved land-use planning is seen to require a state of affairs in which internal cooperation supersedes discord. Cooperation and agreement in one case, and discord and individual orientation in the other resulted from social facts that marked the communities during land occupation and subsequent state-supported land privatization. Processes examined reflected the contrast between a background of hierarchical, subordinated social relations, and a more egalitarian social structure. Todays discrepancies in land-use trajectories and social life were traced back to attitudes and the agency of local residents as they confronted socio-structural and ecological opportunities and constraints in the past."