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Just over a year out from the COP30 climate conference in Belém, unprecedented drought and devastating fires have reminded the world that the Amazon rainforest is still critically threatened, despite recent efforts by the Brazilian government to curb deforestation in the region.
In this IDS Brazil in the World seminar series, Luke Parry of Lancaster University, Principal Investigator of the FORTE project, will explore the potential of a ‘forest citizenship’ approach to empower Amazonian communities to tackle the threats faced by the rainforest.
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 are central to achieving people-centred conservation.
In this seminar, Luke will draw on the project’s findings to attempt two things. First, to revitalize the concept of ‘forest citizenship’ in Amazonia using Brazilian socioambientalismo (social-environmentalism), florestania (a former political project in Acre state), Latin American scholarship on ecological citizenship, and Eurocentric political philosophy. He argues that decades of struggle for territorial recognition and social inclusion have already solidified the ‘right to have rights’ for Amazonia’s forest citizens. So, forest citizens are people who have become so through the socio-political 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 are able to successfully claim other rights from institutions through everyday practices of citizenship.
Second, Luke will present an assessment of the current number and distribution of forest citizens across Brazilian Amazonia, using gridded population data and spatial analysis to calculate the resident population in four territorial categories that meet these democratic preconditions: Indigenous lands, RESEX and RDS sustainable use reserves, ecological settlement projects, and Afro-descendent Quilombola territories. These territories cover 31% of the Legal Amazon, home to 1.05m forest citizens, and have diverse primary policy objectives but shared goals of empowering communities and conserving forests.
It remains uncertain to what extent forest citizens are able to actualize rights in their daily lives. To be emancipatory, forest citizenship must be bottom-up, socially-inclusive, and must improve people’s lives. Luke’s research suggests that conservationists should pay greater attention to power relations and decision-making structures related to forest territories, to identify how territory-based forest citizenship may be relevant for other countries where environmentalism has intersected with struggles for land rights and democracy.
Evan Killick will comment on the relevance of the concept of forest citizenship and its practical implications for land and conservation struggles in Amazonia, drawing on his own work in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador and on the insights emerging from a workshop on territorial protection with indigenous knowledge-holders and researchers from Brazil and the UK that was jointly convened by the University of Sussex and the Federal University of Acre in Rio Branco in July 2024.
Speaker
Luke Parry, Principal Investigator of FORTE (Forest citizenship for disaster resilience: learning from COVID-19) and Reader in Environmental Social Science, Lancaster University Environment Centre
Discussant
Evan Killick, Reader in Anthropology and International Development, University of Sussex School of Global Studies
Chair
Alex Shankland, Senior Fellow, Power and Popular Politics Cluster and Convenor, IDS Brazil Initiative
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