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The Fire Management Dilemma in the Brazilian Amazon: Synthesizing Pathways of Causality across Five Case Studies in the State of Pará

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Abstract

Communities of fire-dependent smallholders in the Amazon face a number of problems associated with fire management norms. We investigate potential causal factors and mechanisms enabling and disabling solutions to these problems through an analysis of five case studies of Amazon communities in the Brazilian state of Pará using two concepts from Ostrom’s (1990) framework for the study of self-governance of common-pool resources: the three main self-governance problems (supply of governance norms, compliance with norms, and monitoring and sanctioning of compliance), and the notion of individual rational action as based in expected net benefit, internal norms, and discount rate. We detail 15 mechanisms through which individual similarity, external intervention, community turnover, and market access influence fire management. Our results suggest the need to include communities in fire policy design, to coordinate with NGOs, to prioritize support on monitoring and sanctioning, to control integration of communities to the land market, and to target integrated fire management.

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Notes

  1. Smallholders annually burn plots of at most three hectares (Carmenta 2013) located at considerable distances from each other, many in remote areas, such as protected areas or agrarian settlements.

  2. We strictly envisage the formulation of hypotheses on causal factors and on mechanisms of causation from case studies. We make no attempt to test causality and thus use the term “potential causal factors” throughout.

  3. Using Table 1 from Ostrom (2007), the following correspondences apply for the specific case of fire dilemma: (GS = governance systems; U = users; I = interactions)

    (i) Supply problem ↔ “(GS5) operational rules” & “(GS6) “collective-choice rules” & “(I3) “deliberation processes” (as one channel of introducing norms in the investigated communities is via deliberation);

    (ii) Compliance problem ↔ “(U9) technology used” & (I5) “investment activities” (as it is reasonable to conceive fire control as a technology and also as an investment; both are constrained by norms whether, for instance, a particular technology/investment such as firebreaks is required);

    (iii) Monitoring and sanctioning problem ↔ “(GS8) Monitoring and sanctioning processes” & “(GS1) Government organizations.

  4. The first-order dilemma is avoiding resource overexploitation, as in the original text, or an outbreak of multiple accidental fires, as our case.

  5. That monitoring is costly, both in terms of time and effort, is evidenced by the common practice of many successful self-governance arrangements of appointing an overseer or guard to monitor community members or outsiders (e.g., see Chakraborty (2001) for Nepal, and Ostrom (1990: Ch.3) for Spain, Japan, and the Swiss Alps). Sanctioning, i.e., punishment, is generally costly as it may jeopardize potentially advantageous social relationships (Smirnov 2007).

  6. For simplicity, hereafter we use the notions of solution to the fire governance problem, of successful collective fire governance, and of cooperation on fire management interchangeably.

  7. Except for Carmenta (2013), most of which has been published.

  8. The evidence on firebreaks is difficult to compare as the two communities differed in how they built firebreaks, with Maguari building cheaper firebreaks that relied on standing forest humidity to work (2004:199).

  9. However, in Carvalheiro (2004), comparisons are confounded by different levels of exposure to the program, which started one year later in the community with lower fire management, the brevity of the observation period (approximately one and a half years), and the program’s premature end.

  10. However, Carmenta (2013) found that awareness of the law had a negative effect on firebreak adoption.

  11. Souza observed that selling community land “resulted in a low level of interest of the remaining families [in the community] regarding the [NGO-led] fire management project.”

  12. The latter was not discussed in the other case studies.

  13. Cammelli (2013) provides the example of a farmer growing perennial crops paying for a staple crop-growing neighbor to build firebreaks.

  14. For instance, the mandatory requirement of a permit to burn is especially mismatched with remote protected areas and indigenous lands that lack access to all- weather roads, preventing enforcement of permits and favouring non-compliance.

  15. Ipixuna do Pará is a rare exception to this statement (Cammelli 2013).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers who suggested a more careful use of the term “causal,” provided the Laerhoven et al. (2020) citation, and recommended the inclusion of Appendix B.

Funding

This study was supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation, grant 2019/05440–5 and by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brasil (CAPES), under Grant Finance Code 00.

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  1. Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil

    Thiago Morello & Lucas Falcão

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  1. Thiago Morello
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Morello, T., Falcão, L. The Fire Management Dilemma in the Brazilian Amazon: Synthesizing Pathways of Causality across Five Case Studies in the State of Pará. Hum Ecol 48, 397–409 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-020-00166-0

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