The Fire Management Dilemma in the Brazilian Amazon: Synthesizing Pathways of Causality across Five Case Studies in the
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The Fire Management Dilemma in the Brazilian Amazon: Synthesizing Pathways of Causality across Five Case Studies in the State of Pará Thiago Morello 1
&
Lucas Falcão 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Communities of fire-dependent smallholders in the Amazon face a number of problems associated with fire management norms. We investigate potential causal factors and mechanisms enabling and disabling solutions to these problems through an analysis of five case studies of Amazon communities in the Brazilian state of Pará using two concepts from Ostrom’s (1990) framework for the study of self-governance of common-pool resources: the three main self-governance problems (supply of governance norms, compliance with norms, and monitoring and sanctioning of compliance), and the notion of individual rational action as based in expected net benefit, internal norms, and discount rate. We detail 15 mechanisms through which individual similarity, external intervention, community turnover, and market access influence fire management. Our results suggest the need to include communities in fire policy design, to coordinate with NGOs, to prioritize support on monitoring and sanctioning, to control integration of communities to the land market, and to target integrated fire management. Keywords Fire . Resource management . Institutional economics . Self-governance . Community-based fire management . Amazon . State of Pará . Brazil
Introduction Although the annual deforestation rate has been reduced considerably since 2004 in the Brazilian Amazon (Barlow et al. 2016; Godar et al. 2014; INPE 2019), in 2019 detected fire occurrences exceeded the average of the last ten years (INPE 2020). These were mostly agricultural burnings, conducted as part of the deforestation process or in areas already deforested, to clear land for cultivation and fix nutrients in the soil at a low cost (Cammelli 2013; Carmenta 2013). The negative impacts of Amazon fires are well-documented in the literature, including atmospheric pollution and derived respiratory morbimortality (Jacobson et al. 2012; Reddington et al. 2015), emission of greenhouse gases (Balch 2014), and uncontrolled fires damaging forests and human assets (Barlow et al. 2012; Mendonça et al. 2004). In the twenty-first century, * Thiago Morello [email protected] Lucas Falcão [email protected] 1
Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil
predictions of a warming and drying climate in the region suggest an increase in these impacts (Aragão et al. 2018; Marengo et al. 2013). However, it is widely recognized that small-scale agriculture and indigenous and other traditional livelihoods have depended on the use of fire for hundreds of years (Fraser et al. 2012; Peña-Venegas et al. 2017), so that control of fires may be more feasible than total suppression. After the catastrophic fire of 1998, multiple governmental policies and NGO programs to increase adoption of fire management techniques to prevent uncontrolled (and unwanted)
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