Amazônia 21

Operational Instruments for Sustainable Development Management in Amazonia

1998–2002 · European Community / INCO-DC · International Research Cooperation · NAEA/UFPA · Pan-Amazonia · Sustainable Development

Socio-Ecological Transition · Material Flow Analysis · Sustainability Indicators · Resource Use · Amazonian Communities · Knowledge & Measurement · Regional Development

Project Overview

Amazônia 21 — Instrumentos Operacionais para o Gerenciamento do Desenvolvimento Sustentável na Amazônia was an international research project concerned with the development and application of analytical instruments for understanding and supporting sustainable development in Amazonia.

Conducted from 1998 to 2002 with financial support from the European Community, the project connected researchers and institutions in Brazil and other Pan-Amazonian countries with European research cooperation. NAEA/UFPA participated as a Brazilian research institution.

Amazônia 21 addressed a fundamental problem of sustainable-development research: broad normative objectives such as sustainability require analytical instruments capable of relating economic and social processes to the use of natural resources and environmental conditions.

The project therefore brought together research on sustainability indicators, material and energy flows, life-cycle analysis, Agenda 21 and socio-ecological transformations. Rather than approaching sustainable development solely as a policy objective, it investigated how relationships between society, economy and natural-resource use could be empirically described, measured and compared.

I participated in the wider Amazônia 21 research environment and coordinated a specific research component on socio-ecological transition and local material flows in Amazonian communities.

Research Context

During the 1990s, sustainable development became an increasingly important framework for research and environmental policy in Amazonia. The challenge, however, extended beyond defining sustainability as a general objective.

Understanding whether particular development trajectories were becoming more or less sustainable required information about the relationships between economic activity, resource extraction, material consumption, environmental pressures and social organization.

Amazônia 21 responded to this problem by exploring operational approaches through which sustainable development could be investigated empirically.

This included attempts to develop indicators and accounting procedures capable of connecting socioeconomic processes with their material basis. Material and energy flow approaches were particularly relevant because they made it possible to examine the quantities and types of natural resources entering economic and social systems and the transformations associated with their use.

Amazonia provided a particularly important setting for this research because local livelihoods, regional economies and wider commodity relations depended in different ways on forests, minerals, agriculture, fisheries, energy and other natural resources.

Research Architecture

Amazônia 21 encompassed several interconnected research components concerned with operational approaches to sustainable-development analysis.

These included work on:

sustainability indicators;
material and energy flow analysis;
life-cycle approaches;
socioeconomic and environmental information;
Agenda 21 and sustainable-development strategies;
resource use and environmental pressures;
local and regional socio-ecological processes.

The project brought these approaches into a wider Pan-Amazonian research setting. Its architecture allowed researchers to examine sustainability at different analytical scales, ranging from national and regional economic processes to particular communities and patterns of resource use.

The project should therefore not be reduced to the socio-ecological transition research that I coordinated. That work constituted one empirical and methodological component within the broader Amazônia 21 research architecture.

Socio-Ecological Transition in Amazonia

Within Amazônia 21, I coordinated the research component:

Transição Sócio-Ecológica na Amazônia: LMFA nas comunidades de Pedreira, Caxiuanã e Laranjal.

This research applied Local Material Flow Analysis (LMFA) to Amazonian communities.

The underlying question was how relationships between social organization, livelihoods and the natural environment could be described through the material flows associated with everyday economic and subsistence activities.

Research was conducted in three communities:

Pedreira;
Caxiuanã;
Laranjal.

The research collected information relevant to local material-flow accounting, including population, land use and patterns of resource use. This provided an empirical basis for investigating how communities organize exchanges with their material environment and how different patterns of production and consumption can be represented through material-flow analysis.

A first report on the research component was completed in June 2000. Initial findings were subsequently presented internationally, while final results from the component were presented within the Amazônia 21 research context in Manaus in 2001.

Material Flow Analysis

Material Flow Analysis offered a distinctive perspective on development and sustainability.

Conventional economic indicators describe economic activities principally through monetary values. Material-flow approaches add another dimension by examining the physical quantities of materials entering, circulating through and leaving economic or social systems.

This creates possibilities for analysing relationships between economic development and the physical appropriation of natural resources.

Within Amazônia 21, this perspective was applied at different scales. Research involving National Material Flow Analysis examined the Brazilian economy, while the research component I coordinated explored the possibilities of applying material-flow accounting at the level of Amazonian communities.

The combination raised an important methodological question: how can analytical approaches designed to measure large economic systems be adapted to smaller and socially heterogeneous settings in which subsistence production, market activities and direct use of natural resources coexist?

The local research therefore contributed not only empirical information about Amazonian communities but also experience concerning the possibilities and limitations of operationalizing material-flow approaches at different analytical scales.

Knowledge, Measurement & Sustainable Development

A particularly important feature of Amazônia 21 was its emphasis on the relationship between knowledge and measurement.

Sustainable development involves normative choices concerning desirable relationships between society, economy and the environment. Yet decisions concerning sustainability also depend upon how these relationships are observed and represented.

Indicators, material-flow accounts and other analytical instruments select particular processes for observation and transform them into comparable forms of information.

In retrospect, Amazônia 21 contributed to my growing interest in the role of knowledge, indicators and measurement in attempts to understand and influence processes of regional development.

At the time, this question was addressed primarily through sustainable-development research and material-flow methodologies. Its later significance for my research lies in the broader problem of how complex regional processes become observable and potentially relevant to decision-making through particular forms of knowledge.

My Role

I participated in the Amazônia 21 research project and coordinated the research component Transição Sócio-Ecológica na Amazônia: LMFA nas comunidades de Pedreira, Caxiuanã e Laranjal.

At NAEA/UFPA, the Brazilian project component was coordinated by Norbert Fenzl.

My work concentrated particularly on the application of material-flow approaches to local Amazonian settings and on the relationship between resource use, social organization and socio-ecological transformation.

This research complemented my work during the same period on public policy and regional development. Whereas research within the Ford Foundation programme increasingly examined political intervention, state organization and municipal governance, Amazônia 21 approached regional-development questions from another direction: through material relations, resource use, sustainability and the construction of indicators capable of describing these processes.

The coexistence of these research strands was subsequently important. It brought political and institutional questions into contact with questions concerning the material and ecological conditions of regional transformation without reducing one dimension to the other.

Research Outputs

Amazônia 21 generated research reports, presentations, academic work and publications associated with its different research components.

Material Flow Analysis and the Brazilian Economy

A confirmed publication directly acknowledging the Amazônia 21 project is:

Machado, José Alberto da Costa, Norbert Fenzl & Armin Mathis (2004). “The Sustainability of Complex Economic Systems: An Application of National Material Flow Analysis (MFA) to the Brazilian Economy.” tripleC, 2(1), 1–5. DOI: 10.31269/triplec.v2i1.11.

The article developed material-flow analysis at the level of the Brazilian economy and explicitly acknowledged its production within the Amazônia 21 project.

Local Material Flow Research

The socio-ecological transition component generated research documentation and academic formation associated with Local Material Flow Analysis. This included research concerning material flows in Caxiuanã.

The available project documentation also records the presentation of preliminary and final results from the LMFA research during the project period.

Not all publications dealing with Agenda 21, sustainability or Amazonian development during these years should be attributed to Amazônia 21. In particular, thematic proximity alone is insufficient to establish a publication as a project output. Outputs are therefore associated with the project here only where the available evidence supports that connection.

Research and Institutional Legacy

Amazônia 21 contributed to a research environment concerned with sustainability, environmental indicators, material flows and the relationships between socioeconomic development and natural-resource use.

Cooperation among researchers associated with this research environment continued beyond the formal project period. This longer-term collaboration became connected to the Grupo de Pesquisa Amazônia 21 (GPA21) at NAEA/UFPA.

The relationship should not be interpreted as evidence that the European project alone created the later research group. Rather, Amazônia 21 formed part of the institutional and intellectual context from which continuing collaboration around sustainability and Amazonian development developed.

This distinction is important because the project's legacy lies not only in particular outputs but also in the research questions, methodological experimentation and cooperation that continued after its formal completion.

Contribution to My Research

Amazônia 21 represents a distinctive strand in the development of my research on regional development.

My earlier work had examined regional transformation particularly through resource extraction, labour, economic organization and public policy. Amazônia 21 introduced more explicitly the material dimensions of socioeconomic processes and the problem of measuring relationships between society and natural-resource use.

Three elements were particularly important.

Materiality. Economic and social processes depend upon material and ecological conditions that cannot be represented adequately through monetary indicators alone.

Measurement. Indicators and accounting systems make selected dimensions of complex socioeconomic and environmental processes observable and comparable.

Scale. Relationships between society and natural resources can be investigated at different analytical levels, but methods developed for national economies cannot simply be transferred unchanged to communities and regional settings.

These questions subsequently remained relevant to my work on society–nature relations, sustainability and regional development.

From Amazônia 21 to Regional Development in World Society

Amazônia 21 was not conceived within the later theoretical framework of Regional Development in World Society (RWS). Its relationship to the current research programme is therefore genealogical rather than theoretical.

The project nevertheless introduced problems that became relevant to later research: the material conditions under which regional processes occur, the production of knowledge about those conditions, and the use of indicators and measurement to make selected dimensions of complex processes observable.

From the perspective of my current research, an important distinction must be maintained. Material flows do not themselves explain regional development. Physical resource use and environmental conditions constitute part of the setting within which social processes occur, while their societal significance depends on how they become observed, communicated and connected to economic, political, scientific and organizational processes.

Amazônia 21 is therefore particularly relevant in retrospect because it brought materiality and measurement into a research trajectory that was simultaneously examining political intervention, organizations and regional differentiation.

This combination subsequently contributed to questions concerning how material conditions become socially observable, how knowledge and measurement mediate their relevance, and how these processes acquire differentiated consequences within particular regional configurations.

Retrospective analytical relevance:
Materiality · Knowledge · Measurement · Indicators · Resource use · Organizations · Society–nature relations · Regional differentiation

The connection to RWS is consequently one of research genealogy rather than theoretical continuity.