Browsing by Autor "Stephen G. Perz"

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Connectivity and Resilience: A Multidimensional Analysis of Infrastructure Impacts in the Southwestern Amazon
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2011) Stephen G. Perz; Alexander Shenkin; Grenville Barnes; Liliana Cabrera; Lucas Araújo Carvalho; Jorge Castillo
Crossing boundaries for environmental science and management: combining interdisciplinary, interorganizational and international collaboration
(Cambridge University Press, 2010) Stephen G. Perz; Silvia Brilhante; Foster Brown; Andrea Chávez Michaelsen; Elsa Mendoza; Veronica Passos; Raul Pinedo; Juan Fernando Reyes; Daniel Rojas; Galia Selaya
SUMMARY Literature on environmental science and management endorses crossing boundaries between disciplines, types of organizations and countries for environmental conservation. A literature review on interdisciplinarity, interorganizational networks and international cooperation highlights their justifying rationales and strategic practices. Crossing boundaries implies substantial challenges to managing collaboration itself, notably politics and uncertainty. Challenges to collaboration become compounded when crossing multiple boundaries simultaneously, here illustrated using the case of three projects in the south-western Amazon. Strategic practices such as net brokering and organizational courtships are highly important when crossing multiple boundaries. There are important commonalities in strategic practices for crossing different boundaries, such as recognizing grievances to manage politics, constituting functional redundancies in networks to manage uncertainty and non-aligned collaboration to manage both difficulties.
Global Economic Integration and Local Community Resilience: Road Paving and Rural Demographic Change in the Southwestern Amazon
(Wiley, 2010) Stephen G. Perz; Liliana Cabrera; Lucas Araújo Carvalho; Jorge Castillo; Grenville Barnes
Recent years have witnessed an expansion in international investment in large-scale infrastructure projects with the goal of achieving global economic integration. We focus on one such project, the Inter-Oceanic Highway in the “MAP” region, a trinational frontier where Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru meet in the southwestern Amazon. We adopt a resilience approach as an integrative framework to understand various types of road-paving impacts. We focus on migration activity as an indicator of retention of collective memory, a concept associated with resilience. We pursue a comparative analysis of the three sides of the MAP frontier as well as subregions within each side. Since road paving may be mediated by other factors, we distinguish among the effects of multiple explanatory factors. Data come from a multinational survey of rural communities. The findings show considerable net migration and turnover, both indicative of eroding collective memory and a lack of demographic resilience to externally induced change in the MAP frontier. The findings indicate variation across the frontier, which road paving helps explain, along with some of the mediating factors. These findings contribute to the literature on the impacts of new infrastructure and integration as well as the study of social-ecological resilience.
Gobernanza de proyectos de infraestructura: pueblos tradicionales y estrategias de conservación y sostenibilidad en la Amazonía
(Taylor & Francis, 2024) Stephen G. Perz; Marliz Arteaga; Sinomar Ferreira da Fonseca; Martha Cecilia Rosero-Peña; Alba Patricia Consuelo Hernández; Waira Jacanamijoy; Flora Macas; Andrea Birgit Chavez Michaelsen; Alexandra Sabo; Robert Buschbacher
Las desigualdades sociales en América Latina siguen siendo evidentes con respecto a los derechos sobre la tierra y la tenencia de recursos. Los proyectos de infraestructura constituyen un elemento clave de las políticas que sirven para mantener tales desigualdades, porque la planificación de la infraestructura está dominada por poderosos intereses y excluye a las partes interesadas subalternas. Esto ha motivado un enfoque en temas de gobernanza de la infraestructura y las estrategias de los grupos subalternos para influir en la planificación. Nos enfocamos en la Amazonía, el objetivo de muchos proyectos de infraestructura y el hogar de muchos grupos subalternos que se han movilizado para resistir la infraestructura y mejorar la gobernanza. Presentamos tres estudios de caso en los que las partes interesadas subalternas siguieron estrategias para intervenir en la planificación de la infraestructura. Dos casos se centran en estrategias instrumentales que buscan un impacto directo por enfoques legales y de comunicación. El tercer caso destaca la colaboración como una estrategia indirecta para apoyar estrategias instrumentales, presentando los factores que afectan la colaboración intercultural. Los casos ofrecen experiencias concretas de diferentes estrategias de los pueblos subalternos para intervenir en la planificación de infraestructura para mejorar la gobernabilidad.
Participatory Action Research for Conservation and Development: Experiences from the Amazon
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021) Stephen G. Perz; Marliz Arteaga; Andrea Baudoin Farah; Foster Brown; Elsa Mendoza; Yara Araújo Pereira de Paula; Leonor Mercedes Perales Yabar; Alan dos Santos Pimentel; Sabina Cerruto Ribeiro; Guillermo Rioja-Ballivián
Research that features participation and action orientation, such as participatory action research (PAR), is especially valuable in contexts where there is rapid change, high social inequality, and great uncertainty about the future, which drives stakeholder demands for information to support their goals. The Amazon offers such a context, for it is a region where diverse stakeholders engage in contestation over environmental governance to address issues such as climate change to achieve conservation and sustainable development. Stakeholder mobilization has changed the terms by which research is conducted, from the definition of priority topics to the application of findings. Due to stakeholder mobilization, more and more research in the Amazon is now necessarily participatory, for stakeholders routinely issue demands about how the research will be conducted and for what purpose. In this paper, we provide an overview of several experiences of implementing methods such as PAR by different teams or networks, focusing on the complementary contributions of outside researchers and local stakeholders. The heart of the paper reports on three broad types of experiences focusing on conservation and development in the Amazon: (1) participatory data collection for co-production of knowledge for environmental governance, (2) inclusive environmental monitoring systems, and (3) innovative models of knowledge exchange to facilitate collective action. Within each type, we report multiple experiences with distinct approaches to participation and action in research. These experiences constitute models that can be replicated in other places for broader impact to support conservation and development.
Private and communal lands? The ramifications of ambiguous resource tenure and regional integration in Northern Bolivia
(Utrecht University Library Open Access Journals (Publishing Services), 2014) Stephen G. Perz; Grenville Barnes; Alexander Shenkin; Daniel Rojas; Carlos E. Vaca
Major integration initiatives such as large-scale infrastructure projects are moving forward in Latin America, creating the conditions theorized by the ‘evolutionary theory of land rights’ (ETLR) for the shift from communal to private individual tenure. This however assumes a clear distinction between communal and private individual tenure that avoids ambiguities such as those arising from contrasts between de jure tenure rights and de facto practices. We take up these issues by focusing on northern Bolivia, an ambiguous case because groups of families with individual land claims recently received communal titles as ‘independent communities’. This has occurred in areas near a major market integration initiative, the Inter-Oceanic Highway, which has recently been paved. We draw on a survey of households in putatively communal lands in northern Bolivia to evaluate the claims of the ETLR concerning regional integration and formalization of private claims and its consequences. We find evidence of practices consistent with private individual tenure, but they are not related to market integration. Further, indications of formalization of private individual rights do not lead to the outcomes anticipated by the ETLR. These findings call for additional comparative work on integration and tenure.
Regional Integration and Household Resilience: Infrastructure Connectivity and Livelihood Diversity in the Southwestern Amazon
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2013) Stephen G. Perz; Martha Rosero; Flávia Leite; Lucas Araújo Carvalho; Jorge Castillo; Carlos Vaca Mejia
Regional integration and local change: road paving, community connectivity, and social–ecological resilience in a tri-national frontier, southwestern Amazonia
(Springer Science+Business Media, 2011) Stephen G. Perz; Liliana Cabrera; Lucas Araújo Carvalho; Jorge Castillo; Rosmery Chacacanta; Rosa E. Cossío; Yeni Franco Solano; Jeffrey Hoelle; Leonor Mercedes Perales; Israel Puerta
Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon
(Royal Society, 2008) Stephen G. Perz; Silvia Brilhante; Foster Brown; Marcellus M. Caldas; Santos Ikeda; Elsa Mendoza; Christine Overdevest; Vera Reis; Juan Fernando Reyes; Daniel Rojas
Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a 'hybrid' model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.
Trans-Boundary Infrastructure and Changes in Rural Livelihood Diversity in the Southwestern Amazon: Resilience and Inequality
(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2015) Stephen G. Perz; Flávia Leite; Lauren Griffin; Jeffrey Hoelle; Martha Rosero; Lucas Resende de Carvalho; Jorge Castillo; Daniel Rojas
Infrastructure has long been a priority in development policy, but there is debate over infrastructure impacts. Whereas economic studies show reductions in poverty, social research has documented growing income inequality. We suggest that a focus on livelihoods permits a bridge between the two literatures by highlighting decisions by households that may capture economic benefits but also yield social inequalities. We therefore take up two questions. First is whether new infrastructure allows households to diversify their livelihoods, where diversity begets resilience and thus affords livelihood sustainability. Second is whether households with more diverse livelihoods exhibit greater increases in livelihood diversity, which would widen livelihood inequalities. We take up the case of the Inter-Oceanic Highway, a trans-boundary infrastructure project in the southwestern Amazon. Findings from a rural household survey for the first question show a strong effect of accessibility on increasing livelihood diversity in areas receiving infrastructure upgrades, an indication that infrastructure fosters household resilience. However, results regarding the second question indicate that households with more diversified livelihoods also exhibit larger increments in diversity, which implies growing livelihood inequality. There remains a need to account for inequalities in livelihood diversity, since less diversified households benefit less from new infrastructure and remain more exposed to risks to their livelihoods.
Trans-boundary infrastructure and land cover change: Highway paving and community-level deforestation in a tri-national frontier in the Amazon
(Elsevier BV, 2013) Stephen G. Perz; Youliang Qiu; Yibin Xia; Jane Southworth; Jing Sun; Matthew Marsik; Karla da Silva Rocha; Veronica Passos; Daniel Rojas; Gabriel Alarcón Aguirre
Trans-boundary infrastructure, access connectivity, and household land use in a tri-national frontier in the Southwestern Amazon
(Taylor & Francis, 2014) Stephen G. Perz; Andrea Chavez; Rosa E. Cossío; Jeffrey Hoelle; Flávia Leite; Karla da Silva Rocha; Rafael O. Rojas; Alexander Shenkin; Lucas Araújo Carvalho; Jorge Castillo
The land science literature has consistently documented the importance of infrastructure for land use. Less attention has gone to land use around national borders receiving trans-boundary infrastructure upgrades for cross-border integration. We take up the case of the Inter-Oceanic Highway, a trans-boundary road being paved in the tri-national ‘MAP’ frontier of the southwestern Amazon. We draw on a tri-national survey of households in rural communities across the MAP frontier to evaluate the effects of access connectivity on land use. At the time of fieldwork, paving was complete in Acre/Brazil, underway in Madre de Dios/Peru, and planned in Pando/Bolivia. This permits a tri-national comparative analysis. The results confirm different effects of access connectivity on land use by paving status; further, they also document cross-border processes stemming from trans-boundary infrastructure that affect land use. The findings call for more attention to the impacts of regional integration initiatives on landscapes.