Community Responses to Historical Land Degradation: Lessons from São Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil

Abstract

São Luiz do Paraitinga is socially and environmentally similar to many other municipalities in the Upper Paraíba River Valley, southeast Brazil. With numerous hills and valleys, it is embedded in the Atlantic Forest biome and maintains a significant cultural ensemble. Colonization and territorial occupation in São Luiz do Paraitinga and the Valley led to deforestation and shaped the landscape, and two centuries of poor land management eroded both the social and natural capitals in the territory. The consequences were rural out-migration, biodiversity loss, strong hopelessness regarding rural livelihoods, and the greatest flooding in the downtown area of the municipality, in 2010. We used a Social-Ecological Systems (SES) perspective as a multidisciplinary-transdisciplinary approach to identify and analyze community initiatives that self-organized as a response to social and environmental degradation, and also to identify the main public policies that currently support these initiatives. Data collection (between 2013 and 2019) included interviews with key stakeholders and direct and participant observations of technical and community meetings, as well as community activities, and data were analyzed with a qualitative approach. Three self-organized community initiatives emerged locally in the last decade: (i) Village community; (ii) Akarui, a non-profit local organization; and (iii) REDESUAPA network. Such initiatives comprise the restoration of native forests, stimuli for the adoption of sustainable farming practices, strengthening local production chains, and social valuation of rural livelihoods. A set of recent public policies-some of them specifically targeting rural areas and the SES under study-have supported these initiatives, by creating conditions for them to develop their activities and apply for public funding, for instance. Overall, the initiatives impact the territory in different levels (local-regional) and have strong potential to change the trajectory of social and environmental degradation of the SES. However, social policies in favor of local smallholder production and rural livelihoods are still fragile, and the initiatives still face difficulties to maintain themselves and/or scale-up.