Luke Parry

This article examines Brazil’s first Common-Use Territory (TUC), established in the Amazon, as a significant innovation in territorial rights that speaks to debates on the commons, the pluriverse, and insurgent universality. Scholarship has emphasised plural ontologies and forms of recognition grounded in identity. We propose instead that the Río Manicoré TUC is best understood in terms of insurgent universality: a women-led popular struggle in which concretely universal claims emerge from the defence of collective ways of life, rather than from abstract rights or fixed identities. Drawing on Karen Ng’s interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s concept of concrete universal humanity, we understand the TUC as an expression of existential freedom rooted in forest peoples’ common-use practices. Our ethnographic and historical analysis traces a longer trajectory of Amazonian resistance to capitalist expropriation, stretching from the early twentieth-century rebellion against Colonel Lindoso to contemporary mobilisations against logging, land grabbing, and industrial extractivism. Unlike state-managed conservation and agrarian reform units, the TUC centres forest peoples’ rights to traditionally occupied territories and collective self-government. In doing so, it moves beyond the exclusions associated with exclusive identity categories such as Indigenous and quilombola lands. By bringing diverse forest peoples together around shared common-use practices, this insurgent, universal model affirms their autonomy while resisting capitalist encroachment and state fragmentation. The Río Manicoré TUC also shows how popular struggles can transform legal frameworks. Since its recognition in 2022, twelve additional TUCs are now under consideration, and in 2025 the federal government adopted the model as a means of regularising traditionally occupied lands in undesignated forests across Brazil’s Legal Amazon. Serious challenges nevertheless remain. State institutions have failed to protect the TUC against illegal logging and land grabbing. Even so, the institutionalisation of insurgent universality through the TUC has both conceptual and practical relevance for the defence of collective rights in forest conservation worldwide. It points towards a planetary politics of the commons capable of reconciling social justice with environmental governance through the shared stewardship of land, water, and life.

Halting deforestation and promoting restoration are at the core of strategies to confront the biodiversity and climate crises in tropical forests. Avoiding forest disturbances is also critically important but has received far less attention, and there is a lack of clarity about the relative cost-effectiveness of these three interventions. We compare the biodiversity and carbon benefits and costs associated with each intervention, comparing observed and counterfactual outcomes based on in-depth field assessments and high-resolution remote sensing in the Brazilian Amazon deforestation frontier. Avoidance interventions delivered the greatest benefits and were more cost-effective than restoration, with results being robust to a range of benefit and cost assumptions. However, combined interventions delivered the greatest gains and were essential to reverse biodiversity and carbon losses.

Top‐down interventions carried out by state and nonstate institutions to conserve biodiversity and improve the lives of forest‐proximate people (FPP) in the Global South tend to reflect economistic understandings of human well‐being. More progressive and people‐centered conservation projects are guided by normative visions of how the world should be, yet these projects are limited because the social dimensions of project design, planning, and evaluation often remain focused on quantifiable aspects of well‐being. We demonstrated that considering human well‐being qualitatively in terms of freedom and dignity can help achieve rights‐based, people‐centered conservation. We applied the capabilities approach (CA), a social theory that emphasizes marginalized people's freedom to live a life they have reason to value. First, we reviewed English‐language literature to assess how the CA has been used conceptually and empirically to examine the well‐being of FPP. Based on 31 methodologically diverse studies from 16 countries, we found that equitable access to forest resources is essential for the flourishing of FPP, capability creation for FPP requires strong and local social institutions, and FPP's agency (a person's power to act and bring about change) to pursue valued capabilities is often deeply embedded in collective structures. Thus, we developed a framework to guide people‐centered conservation actions that promote the flourishing of FPP. We applied this framework to the Brazilian Caatinga dry forest, which is characterized by diverse use of forest resources and deep social inequities, and identified examples of conservation practices and their mixed influences on the lives of people in this biome. Adopting the CA can help ensure that people‐centered conservation initiatives uphold FPP's rights and prioritize their well‐being, while striving for sustainability.

Food insecurity, a latent construct defined as the lack of consistent access to sufficient and nutritious food, is a pressing global issue with serious health and social justice implications. Item factor analysis is commonly used to study such latent constructs, but it typically assumes independence between sampling units. In the context of food insecurity, this assumption is often unrealistic, as food access is linked to socioeconomic conditions and social relations that are spatially structured. To address this, we propose a spatial item factor analysis model that captures spatial dependence, allowing us to predict latent factors at unsampled locations and identify food insecurity hotspots. We develop a Bayesian sampling scheme for inference and illustrate the explanatory strength of our model by analysing household perceptions of food insecurity in Ipixuna, a remote river-dependent urban centre in the Brazilian Amazon. Our approach is implemented in the R package spifa, with further details provided in the Supplementary Material. This spatial extension offers policymakers and researchers a stronger tool for understanding and addressing food insecurity to locate and prioritise areas in greatest need. Our proposed methodology can be applied more widely to other spatially structured latent constructs.

Demands for territorial recognition are foundational to the claiming of rights by forest‐proximate people who attempt to conserve their forests. The rights of these often‐marginalized populations have been largely overlooked by conservationists, yet they are central to achieving people‐centered conservation. We further developed the concept of forest citizenship as a normative framework and analytical tool based on Brazilian social environmentalism ( socioambientalismo ), florestania (a former political project in Acre state), Latin American scholarship on ecological citizenship, and Eurocentric political philosophy. Decades of struggle for territorial recognition and social inclusion have solidified the right to have rights for Amazonia's forest citizens. Hence, forest citizens are people who have become so through the sociopolitical dynamics of their rights claims. Forest citizenship is built on community mobilization to create legally recognized territories with participatory governance but becomes tangible only if individuals and communities can successfully claim other rights from institutions through everyday practices of citizenship. We also assessed the current number and distribution of forest citizens across Brazilian Amazonia based on gridded population data and spatial analyses to calculate the resident population in four territorial categories that meet these democratic preconditions: Indigenous lands, extractive reserves, sustainable development reserves, ecological settlement projects, and Afro‐descendent Quilombola territories. The territories covered 31% of the Legal Amazon, were home to 1.05 million forest citizens, and had diverse primary policy objectives but shared goals of empowering communities and conserving forests. To be emancipatory, forest citizenship must be bottom‐up, socially inclusive, and improve people's lives. We suggest that conservationists pay greater attention to power relations and decision‐making structures related to forest territories. Territory‐based forest citizenship may be relevant for other countries where environmentalism has intersected with struggles for land rights and democracy.

Background: The double burden of malnutrition (DBM) in the same individual is a neglected public health concern, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The DBM is associated with increased risks of non-communicable diseases, childbirth complications, and healthcare costs related to obesity in adulthood. However, evaluating low prevalence outcomes in relatively small populations is challenging using conventional frequentist statistics. Our study used Bayesian latent models to estimate DBM prevalence at the individual-level in small populations located in remote towns and rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon.Methods: We employed a cross-sectional survey of urban and rural children aged 6–59 months, considering DBM as the coexistence of stunting and overweight in the same individual. We evaluated four river-dependent municipalities, sampling children in randomly selected households in each town and a total of 60 riverine forest-proximate communities. Through Bayesian modeling we estimated the latent double burden of malnutrition (LDBM) and credible intervals (CI).Results: The exceedance probability of LDBM was used to quantify this form of malnutrition at the population level. Rural prevalence of LDBM was significantly higher in Jutai (3.3%; CI: 1.5% to 6.7%) compared to Maues and Caapiranga. The likelihood that LDBM rural prevalence exceeded 1% was very high in Jutai (99.7%), and Ipixuna (63.2%), and very low (< 2%) in rural communities elsewhere. Exceedance probabilities (at 1%) also varied widely among urban sub-populations, from 6.7% in Maues to 41.2% in Caapiranga. The exceedance probability of LDBM prevalence being above 3.0% was high in rural Jutai (59.7%).Discussion: Our results have important implications for assessing DBM in vulnerable and marginalized populations, where health and nutritional status are often poorest, and public health efforts remain focused on undernutrition. Our analytical approach could enable more accurate estimation of low prevalence health outcomes, and strengthen DBM monitoring of hard-to-reach populations.

The relationship between deforestation and human development is contested in Latin America and may vary between biomes. We evaluated the boom-bust hypothesis across agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Caatinga dry forest, using panel data (1991-2000-2010) and cross-sectional data (2010) from 1207 municipalities. Municipalities in the advanced deforestation stage (> 66% forest cover lost) had the best development outcomes in 1991 yet by 2010 no indicators were superior to those of intermediate (33 > 66%) and initial stages (< 33%). Initial stage municipalities showed least improvement in development metrics across time, whereas progress was quicker within intermediate frontier stages. Relative improvements in longevity, poverty alleviation, income inequality, and child mortality did not result in a “bust”, but instead, progress stagnated in advanced stage municipalities. Our cross-sectional analysis used a quasi-experimental approach and control for spatial autocorrelation and revealed a relative boom-bust in five of six development indicators. Overall, we find strong evidence that exploitation of natural resources is insufficient for achieving sustained development progress.

O objetivo deste artigo é discutir os alcances e os limites do acesso aos direitos de cidadania por povos da floresta no contexto da pandemia da Covid-19. Para tanto, é apresentada uma análise das ações do Estado, de agentes externos e dos povos da floresta no enfrentamento da pandemia na Resex do Iriri (Altamira, PA). A análise toma como base teórica a noção de brutalismo como forma de exercício da política, tal como proposta por Mbembe (2020). Este estudo testa a hipótese de que a pandemia foi um momento de ruptura em uma organização hierárquica e desigual que, historicamente, produziu exclusões de diversas ordens e reforçou lugares específicos para os povos e corpos territorialmente marcados. Os resultados do estudo revelam que os povos da floresta adotaram condutas inovadoras no intuito de conter a proliferação da doença e, ainda, de alçar direitos até então negados. A maior parte destas ações pôde ir a cabo em razão das parcerias externas – situação que revela paradoxos em relação ao exercício dos direitos.

Inner phenomena, such as personal motivations for pursuing sustainability, may be critical levers for improving conservation outcomes. Most conservation research and policies, however, focus on external phenomena (e.g., ecological change or economic processes). We explored the factors shaping 9 conservation attitudes toward forest and wildlife protection among colonist farmers around an Amazonian deforestation frontier. Our data comprised 241 face‐to‐face quantitative surveys, complemented with qualitative insights from open‐ended questionnaire responses and opportunistic semistructured interviews. To account for the full spectrum of possible inner motivations, we employed measures of nature connection (indicating biospheric motivation) and personal values organized around the traditionalism (traditionalist through to high openness to change) and universalism dimensions (egoistic through to altruistic motivations). We used averaged beta‐binomial generalized linear models to assess the role of external factors (socioeconomic, sociodemographic, and environmental) and personal (inner) motivations on the variation in attitudes. Each attitude was modeled separately. The relative importance of each predictor was judged by the proportion of models where it appeared as significant. Proconservation views were expressed by the majority (at least 65%) of the respondents in 7 out of the 9 attitude models. The most consistent predictors were emotional nature connection and personal values (significant in 4–6 out of 9 models), rather than external phenomena (significant in 0–5 models). However, the poorest farmers had lower scores on the agreement with prioritizing nature over development (𝛽 = –0.52, 95% CI: –0.96 to –0.07). Qualitative data also indicated that economic barriers hinder forest conservation on farms. These results suggest that biospheric, traditionalistic, and altruistic motivations promote people's proconservation attitudes, but nurturing these latent motivations is unlikely to improve conservation outcomes if material poverty remains unaddressed. Integrating the inner–outer perspective into conservation thinking and practical interventions could foster environmental stewardship and increase human well‐being.

Fishing provides livelihoods and food for millions of people in the Global South yet inland fisheries are under-researched and neglected in food and nutrition policy. This paper goes beyond the rural focus of existing research and examines how urban households may use fishing as a livelihood strategy for coping with food insecurity. Our study in Brazilian Amazonia is based on a random sample of households (n = 798) in four remote riverine towns. We quantitatively examine the inter-connections between fishing and food insecurity, and find that fishing is a widespread coping strategy among disadvantaged, food insecure households. Fisher households tend to be highly dependent on eating fish, and for these households, consuming fish more often is associated with a modest reduction in food insecurity risks. Fishing provides monthly non-monetary income worth ≤ USD54 (equivalent to ∼12% of mean monetary income), potentially reducing food insecurity risks almost as much as the conditional cash transfer Bolsa Família. We estimate that nearly half a million inhabitants of the region’s remote, riverine urban centres are directly dependent on a household member catching fish, a nutritious and culturally preferred food. Consequently, small-scale urban fishers must be recognised in policy debates around food and nutrition security and management of natural resources.