Abstract
Many different fields of knowledge approach social problems such as the overuse of resources necessary for human development and survival. Joining that enterprise, behavior analysts strive for a clear description of the contingencies that select problematic cultural practices or prevent the spread of solutional patterns of behavior. This description ought to encompass the reinforcement contingencies that operate not only at the ontogenetic level but also at the cultural level. For that enterprise, especially when one looks at the possible overuse of common pool resources, a dialogue with Elinor Ostrom’s work is valuable. This article aims to describe and analyze the selection of different cultural practices in the case of the production of açaí berries in the Brazilian Amazon. In the past, caboclo communities in the Amazon region harvested and consumed the fruit in sustainable common pool management. The boom in the economy in the last 50 years has led to new practices. This paper argues that the profit of this market has selected new interlocked behavioral contingencies that may have different long-term natural effects, such as environmental erosion, and social costs, such as the exclusion of the traditional populations and the limiting of the low-income population’s access to the product.
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Notes
The classification provided by Ostrom et al. (1994) also defines public goods (difficult to exclude users, low subtractability), toll or club goods (easy to exclude users, low subtractability), and private goods (easy to exclude users, high subtractability). The current article addresses only CPRs.
These are traditional communities that were constituted as enclaves of escaped slaves during the colonial era of Brazil. Many such communities are spread across Brazil and are politically organized for racial and political rights, such as the tenure of the land they inhabited for generations and the fight against decades of marginalization by state powers (Schmitt, Turatti, & Carvalho, 2002)
“Ethnogenesis is a process of historic construction from interethnic interactions that originate new social categories, in other words, that form groups that distinguish from the rest of society” (Baia et al., 2017, p. 52). Baia et al. (2017) also presented an analysis of the practices of a different ethnic group in Brazil.
“Quem foi ao Pará parou, tomou açaí e lá ficou.”
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the participants in the think tank for their contributions, especially Dr. Angelo Augusto Sampaio, Dr. Laercia Abreu Vasconcelos, Dr. Maria Malott, Dr. Roberta Lemos, and Dr. Sigrid Glenn for their comments on the first draft of this manuscript. The author presented a previous version of this manuscript during the 2018 Think Tank in Culturo-Behavior Science in Denton, Texas, and at the 2019 Association for Behavior Analysis International Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
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Borba, A. The Selection of Different Interlocked Behavioral Contingencies and Maintenance of Common Pool Resources: The Case of the Production of Açaí Berries in the Brazilian Amazon. Behav. Soc. Iss. 28, 229–247 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-019-00016-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42822-019-00016-9