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Summary: The present paper considers a sometimes contentious process of land reform presently occurring in Brazil. This process, referred to in the paper as Direct Action Land Reform (DALR), involves organizations such as the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) and more spontaneous actions of individuals desiring a piece of land for their own. Results of a survey covering 751 households engaged in such land reform actions in the Brazilian Amazon are presented, in order to describe participants and land reform processes. Evidently, social movement organizations provide for a modest degree of wealth accumulation, a welfare improvement that must be set against potential environmental costs. The paper concludes by calling attention to the challenge DALR may ultimately pose to the Brazilian state. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

(Paternalism and clientelism as effects of conjunction between paternalist oppression and capitalist exploration). This paper arises from two questions: why do paternalism and clientelism phenomena in modern Latin America populism remain so insensible to the Marxist critic of capitalistic exploitation? Why, are they, at the same time, ostile to any kind of regional or indigenous power (in the case of Amazonia and Andean countries)? My hypothesis is that such mechanisms could also popular identification processes that may correspond to progressive forces, as well as to some forms of alienation of the logic of economic and social reciprocity. On the one hand, they can express the resistance of a reciprocal economy and community to the expansion of the capitalistic exchange domain. But, on the other hand, they could represent the alienation of the logic of reciprocity, through its asymmetric forms of redistribution (or centralized reciprocity): paternalism and clientelism. I see, in the limits of socio-political critiques and in the renewal of populism in Latin America, a superposition and cohabitation between the alienation specific of reciprocity systems - the paternalist oppression - and the alienation arising from the exchange system: the capitalistic exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community forest management in the Amazon has been subject to institutional changes because of a shift from government to governance. Although these changes aim to create opportunities for local communities, the effectiveness of new institutions remains arbitrary. In particular, the unpredictability of legislative outcomes—as one of the institutional changes—evokes discussion on how local people respond to new institutions. This article analyzes the effects of forest institutions at the local level. By using the concept of institutional bricolage, the article argues that institutions in practice work differently than intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]