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Butterfly-farming projects have been economically successful, increasing livelihood opportunities for local people and promoting women's empowerment, governance, and conservation behavior. Moreover, local butterfly exhibitions can diversify the attractions of natural reserves and promote ecotourism. Butterfly farming involves rearing butterflies in captivity and marketing them to local or international exhibitions. We researched the feasibility of a butterfly farming project in Western Ecuador during summer 2013 as part of a longer-term applied research program involving capacity-building for local people. A preliminary strategic plan was developed, including a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis and an analysis of market demand for a butterfly exhibition. In addition, biological research was carried out, and local people were trained to address two main weaknesses to implement an exhibition. Results showed that a butterfly farming project is feasible in the area due to the availability of biological information about butterfly species, a market niche for a butterfly exhibition at the reserve, and increased technical capacity and willingness of local stakeholders to participate. This study contributes to understanding how applied biological research can act synergistically to promote sustainability and ecotourism in collaboration with local people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Amazonian frontier, shaped by developmentalist policies in the 1970s and 1980s and a socio-environmental response in the 1990s, has historically been a site of widespread violence and environmental destruction. After the imposition of new environmental governance measures in the mid-2000s, deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon dropped to historic lows. Many analyses of this 'greening' of Amazonia operate within a limited historical perspective that obscures complex and still-evolving contestation among diverse actors and projects. The long-term evolution of the frontier is illustrated dramatically in the municipality of São Félix do Xingu (São Félix). Emerging as a 'contested frontier' in the 1970s, São Félix in the early 2000s lost over 1000 km2 of forest annually, but since the mid-2000s, the municipality has entered a period of 'greening'. This contribution deploys a historical political ecology framework to analyse how decades of agrarian frontier change and land conflicts among actors on the ground interacted with shifting national policy debates. Nearly a half-decade of field research in São Félix is combined with data from a 2014 field 'revisit' to situate the current 'greening' of policy and discourse within the longer term history of frontier development, revealing positive social and environmental developments and persistent contradictions and uncertainties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]