Forest-making in agrarian frontiers Place-based transformative pathways toward sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon

The Brazilian Amazon’s arc of deforestation is an agrarian frontier dominated by large-scale commodity production. Deforestation patterns are supported by lock-in mechanisms of various forms: politico-institutional (e.g., party politics, public policies), techno-economic (e.g., technical knowledge, financial incentives), and socio-cognitive (e.g., narratives, values, perceptions). Within this context, many place-based forest restoration initiatives have existed and resisted for decades, although often underacknowledged and invisibilized. In this thesis, I ask how such place-based forest restoration initiatives carve transformative pathways toward sustainability in agrarian frontiers of the Brazilian Amazon. To answer this question, I propose a place-based approach to transformative pathways, highlighting three main aspects. First, the protagonism of local communities in transforming the landscape based on territorial attachment, human-nature connectedness and relational values to forests. Second, their local agency continuously exercised through a silent praxis of resistance in everyday life. Third, the cross-scale nature of such pathways, embedded in political contexts that can nudge transformations in (un)sustainable directions. State-level politics play a key mediating role in this process, buffering or reinforcing lock-in mechanisms through a narrative-policy nexus. Therefore, this thesis analyzes two contrasting states in the arc of deforestation: Acre, a new frontier state, renowned for its history of forest protection and socioenvironmental mobilizations; and Mato Grosso, Brazil’s largest soy producer and exporter and a consolidated frontier of commodity expansion. Within each state, I look into a relevant place-based forest restoration initiative: the RECA Agroforestry Project in the border of Rondônia and Acre, and the Xingu Seed Network in Mato Grosso. I analyze what I label as the triggering, nurturing and resilience phases of their transformative pathways and how they play out in such different contexts. The analysis is based on three rounds of semi-structured interviews, two rounds of field visits, an online survey, as well as document analysis of public policies and institutional materials from the case studies, all conducted between 2019 and 2022. The results show that, even in face of high deforestation pressures, these initiatives challenge the dominant commodity system by actively making forests in agrarian frontiers through multidimensional transformations in values, practices and politics. Recognizing these initiatives as crucial agents of change toward sustainable futures is a key step in counteracting the enduring patterns of deforestation in the tropics.