Amazonia in motion: Changing politics, development strategies, peoples, landscapes and livelihoods

Abstract

We review the often-invisible powerful processes that drive social and ecological change in Amazonia, and the diverse peoples who inhabit its landscapes. It explores large-scale development ideologies of modernization, and the policy tools that were deployed to carry them out. Outlining general periods of macro policy shifts, we show the evolution of the framework for today’s complex interactions between large-scale agroindustry, mining, and hydrocarbons, and diverse small-scale livelihoods, as well as the clandestine and illicit economies of land grabbing, gold, coca and timber, and their operation in globalized and regional economies. While Pan-Amazonian governments have oscillated between authoritarian and democratic forms of governance since the mid-20th century, more democratic transformations and trade openings have led to interactions among a wide array of new civil society actors and international sources of funding. Integration into numerous globalized markets and finance have had enormous effects on Amazonian politics and economies at all scales. These dynamics have generated new kinds of policies, political framings, institutions, and economies, and restructured old ones, reshaped forms of urbanization, settlements, and land regimes, and stimulated extensive and controversial infrastructure development. On the ground, diverse Amazonian peoples who often suffer the impacts of these processes have continued to adapt to changing circumstances while fighting to advance their own proposals for alternative forms of Amazon conservation and development.