DURAMAZ3 - Sustainability and regional socio-ecological transition pathways in the Amazon – DURAMAZ3

The Amazon region is at the crossroads of development and sustainability, possibly heading
towards an ecological collapse. Despite significant economic development, public policy
interventions and the emergence of place-based sustainability initiatives over the past decades,
it has proven difficult to reverse ecological degradation, as demonstrated by the number of fires,
record droughts and other catastrophes in recent years. Why all these initiatives have not led to
clearer shifts in local development and led to sustainable development pathways is a question
with multiple intertwined answers.

The DURAMAZ3 project aims to examine ongoing transition pathways in selected regions of the
Brazilian Amazon, to understand how and under which conditions local-level changes may drive
higher-scale social-ecological systemic change. Specifically, the project investigates the
underexplored role municipalities or intermediary-scale actors, or institutional arrangements,
play in this process through three interrelated research questions: (1) What transition pathways
have the selected regions undergone over the last 20 years, how can they be accounted for,
and how have local communities perceived these transformations?; (2) Have economic
development and public policies fostered the emergence of meso-scale institutional
arrangements that fit the social-ecological challenges they seek to address and enable
territories to confront emerging issues?; and (3) How can local institutional arrangements
innovate and integrate lower and higher spatial and organizational scales to effectively address
emerging social-ecological challenges?

DURAMAZ 3’s multidisciplinary Brazilian-French research team will focus on a representative
panel of Brazilian Amazon’s societies, ecosystems, and development models, adopting a co-
production approach by actively engaging local stakeholders in the research process. Using a
mixed-methods approach, the team will leverage fieldwork campaigns, remote sensing, newly
available data and computing tools to support an in-depth assessment of territorial processes
and institutional arrangements, while evaluating the impact of public policies and sustainability
initiatives that communities have benefitted from over decades. Leveraging DURAMAZ1 and
DURAMAZ2 research programs, the team will build upon an existing, large set of quantitative
and qualitative data, indispensable personal contacts, and knowledge about the selected
regions, thus offering an unprecedented longitudinal dataset and a unique window into the long-
term trajectory of Amazon communities.

The project will co-produce several outputs with local stakeholders: (1) retrospective social-
ecological assessments combining qualitative data to remote sensing analyses and available
statistical data; (2) a comprehensive multi-dimensional (environment, socio-economic, health,
and institutional) indicator system to characterize ongoing transition pathways, integrated to a
publicly-accessible, citizen science web-platform; (3) co-constructed prospective scenarios for
sustainability pathways; and (4) serious games to be used as tools to foster dialogue and
participatory processes in the definition of scenarios.

The project’s unique approach will allow to capture fine-grained, local-scale processes that
large-scale quantitative and regional approaches cannot easily capture, and most importantly
will capture the perceptions and visions of local stakeholders. The diversity of selected regions
will also allow to identify differences in key factors and local context influence the sustainability
pathways of each place, combining qualitative and quantitative insights about cross-scale
institutional processes at a scale reached only by a few projects, and generating shared insights
and tools for local and regional territorial planning and research, as well as public policies.