Search

It is often argued that various forms of illegality persist in the Brazilian Amazon because of weak frontier governance. However, very little is understood about how this governance can be strengthened in the context of social and spatial change in a way that will counter illegality. Drawing on the concept of heterotopias, as discussed by Michel Foucault, and the life history of an illegal logger in an agrarian reform settlement project in the state of Pará, this paper approaches frontier governance by conceptualising the 'settlement heterotopia' as a real, lived-in place in which the space that makes up various state and nonstate actors' sites of action interact and continually rearrange power relations. This rearrangement process may or may not work to legitimise illegality and, therefore, strengthening frontier governance involves a process by which collaborative power relations emerge and residents decide to work with the state instead of alongside illegality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental journalism has recently made a comeback in Brazil after almost half a century of irrelevance, while the push for quick and wasteful economic development has overshadowed any competing political priorities. Its return to newspapers front pages and television prime time is confronting Brazilians with a reality they have long tried to ignore: the enormity of the deforestation problem in the Amazon region and of the depletion of crucial rivers throughout the country. No wonder environmental journalism was first greeted with suspicion when triggered by the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development, as a foreign source of bad news undermining the local perception of Brazil as a bountiful and inexhaustible tropical paradise. A true national debate about conserving Brazil's natural resources is still lacking. As this article shows, environmental journalists need to look back to the rich tradition of environmental journalism in Brazil decades ago, exemplified by no one better than Euclydes da Cunha in his masterpiece Os Sertões published in 1897. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers often need to know the parental school attainment of adult subjects. When researchers cannot ask parents about their school attainment, they must ask adult offspring about the school attainment of their parents. We assess the accuracy of answers provided by adults about the school attainment of their parents with data from a native Amazonian society in Bolivia (Tsimane'). Offspring overestimate the school attainment of their parents. They also report inaccurately other human capital attributes of their parents (e.g., writing skills, fluency speaking Spanish, practical indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants). Results mesh with findings from the United States about the lack of reliability of adults' self-reports about parental school attainment and with prior research among the Tsimane' suggesting significant misreporting of other outcomes (e.g., age, income, parental height). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses land-cover and land-use dynamics from the perspective of regional science and economic geography. It first provides an account of the so-called spatially explicit model, which has emerged in recent years as a key empirical approach to the issue. The article uses this discussion as a springboard to evaluate the potential utility of von Thünen to the discourse on land-cover and land-use change. After identifying shortcomings of current theoretical approaches to land use in mainly urban models, the article filters a discussion of deforestation through the lens of bid-rent and assesses its effectiveness in helping us comprehend the destruction of tropical forest in the Amazon basin. The article considers the adjustments that would have to be made to existing theory to make it more useful to the empirical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]