The AGENTS project has organized a number of meetings in the second half of 2021, including three scientific seminars at which project team members presented their research and manuscripts in development to their peers, sharing news on eight papers that are currently in progress. These address a range of aspects of local-based initiatives in the Amazon.

The project also organized two virtual dialogues with local partners in Santarem (Pará state, Brazil), exploring how the AGENTS project could help give visibility to local-based initiatives and connect with local leaders, and how the current crisis has affected local-based initiatives and they have been able to overcome it.

This focus on the actions of local stakeholders in the Brazilian Amazon is also being deepened through analysis of the results of an online survey which ran between July and October. The survey asked questions about the relation between NGOs and state-level governments, as well as the factors that are crucial for the creation and continuity of local forest-based initiatives. It focused on the states of Acre and Mato Grosso, which are two contrasting landscapes: the former a conservation frontier and the latter a deforestation frontier. The results are being currently analysed and will contribute to two PhD theses in progress under the scope of the project.

In October 2021 project team members participated in two online round tables at the 10th Conference of the National Association for Graduate Studies and Research in Environment and Society in Brazil (10th ENANPPAS). AGENTS researchers and local partners discussed the relevance of collaborative, active and participatory research to strengthen sustainable initiatives as part of the paneli discussion on “Sustainable initiatives and the role of collaborative research in the Amazon region”. In the panel “Transformation towards sustainability in a world in crises” early career researchers from three research projects – AGENTS, CONVIVA and GOLD MATTERS – discussed how transdisciplinarity and co-production are applied in their respective projects.

Photo by Kate Evans/CIFOR.