Protecting the Amazon and Its People: The Role of Civil Society in the Local Effectiveness of Transnational Partnerships

Abstract

Partnerships are defined as voluntary agreements among public and a variety of private actors on specific governance objectives and the means to advance them. This chapter reports on an inductive study of a sustainable development reserve, which revealed the important contributions of civil society actors to transnational partnership effectiveness at the local level. As transnational partnerships are implemented at the local level, they become embedded in that location’s political and social realities. Deforestation in the Amazon has multiple entangled causes, the majority of which are related to economic or social causes: land speculation and land grabs, global commodities markets, money laundering, logging, mining, roads, soybeans, cattle ranching, household dynamics, and population growth.