title: Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon.
abstract: Some coupled land-climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a 'hybrid' model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, University of Florida, PO Box 117330, Gainesville, FL 32611-7330, USA. sperz@ufl.edu
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Perz
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brilhante
authors.forename: Foster
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Marcellus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Caldas
authors.forename: Santos
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ikeda
authors.forename: Elsa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mendoza
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Overdevest
authors.forename: Vera
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Reis
authors.forename: Juan Fernando
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Reyes
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rojas
authors.forename: Marianne
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schmink
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Souza
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D004777:Environment; D006076:Government; D017752:Greenhouse Effect; D014186:Transportation