The role of institutions in land-use/cover-change in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, Acre, Brazil

Access restricted to the OSU CommunityThis dissertation explores the relationship between institutions, people, land-use, and forest conditions in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve (CMER) of Acre, Brazil. Guided by approaches common to cultural and political ecology, environment and development, and land-change science, the study draws on research methods from the social, environmental, and remote sensing sciences. Data include household surveys, community meetings, open-ended interviews with reserve officials, forest mensuration, and land classifications and change detection. The data were analyzed by way of multiple logistic regression and statistical analysis of the variance. The research focuses on three themes. The first links a remote sensing analysis with household surveys to explore the differences in deforestation by economic orientation of communities. Results show that rubber tappers are increasingly turning away from traditional extractive activities, and are instead more dependent on agriculture and smallscale cattle ranching, leading to increasing deforestation within the reserve. The second theme uses a common property framework to explore the institutional dimensions driving land-use/cover-change, revealing that active participation in the reserve's social organization helps to curb deforestation at both the community and household level. The third theme expands the discussion regarding the reserve's management beyond issues of deforestation to consider implications for assessing sustainable forest uses through an examination of two methods -- remote sensing and forest mensuration -- of the environmental impact of two communities, one extractive oriented and one cattle oriented. Results reveal that the land uses emphasized in each community lead to differential ecological impacts. The non-traditional community has a greater impact on forest cover, while the extractive community affects biodiversity indicators more, reducing tree species diversity, density and total basal area, revealing that the scale of analysis matters in assessing the performance of conservation areas. Together, this study reveals the CMER to be a weak common property regime with considerable dynamics in play regarding land use and cover. As rubber tappers become small-scale cattle ranchers, existing rules based on extractive activities become irrelevant. To be successful at governing the reserve's resources, the rules need to be updated, and must be flexible, adapting to changing livelihood trajectories, and recognizing the needs of its residents