AGENTS: Amazonian Governance to Enable Transformations to Sustainability

The Amazon basin hosts locally and globally important environmental services, social-cultural diversity, and economic activities. Governing this region amid accelerated changes is a pressing challenge for Amazonian countries. While government programs are often more visible and certainly important, most sustainable forest management is locally initiated. Building upon long-term research of team members, the project integrates geospatial analyses and participatory methodologies to assess non-state conservation efforts and challenges via stakeholder engagement, in-depth field research, modeling of land change and conservation, and participatory scenarios.

The project will map where and how non-state actors sustainably use and conserve forests and ecosystems in social-ecologically diverse areas within the Xingu basin and Brazil-Peru-Bolivia tri-frontier. The project will analyze 25 years of land use change in watersheds shared by communal, state, private and protected lands to identify interactions and conservation patterns. The team will define governance problems, research questions, analyze initial results, and draft scenarios in collaboration with diverse land users sharing common watersheds.

The project supports initiatives recognizing the role of individual/collective action to conserve forests, their contrasts and synergies, and their contributions to meet the goals of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). The project will exchange and co-produce knowledge with land users, researchers, and decision makers, sharing our findings in diverse academic forums, workshops, policy-briefs, as appropriate written in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Lessons from the Amazon may be applicable to similar conditions around the tropics.

Find out more on the AGENTS website.

Project leader: Prof. E. Brondízio, Indiana University (United States)

Principal investigators: Dr. F. De Castro, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Prof. C.R. Futemma, State University of Campinas (Brazil), Dr. C. Salk, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden), Prof. K. Andersson, University of Colorado at Boulder (United States), Dr. M. Tengö, Stockholm University (Sweden)