Formal and Informal Practices of Natural Resource Use and Management in the Amazon

2011–2015 · CAPES–NUFFIC · Brazil–Netherlands Research Cooperation · Natural Resource Governance · Amazonia

Project Overview

Formal and Informal Practices of Natural Resource Use and Management in the Amazon was a four-year international research and postgraduate cooperation project between the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), through the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos (NAEA) and its Graduate Programme in Sustainable Development of the Humid Tropics (PPGDSTU), and the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA) in Amsterdam.

The project was coordinated in Brazil by Armin Mathis (UFPA/NAEA) and in the Netherlands by Marjo de Theije (CEDLA). It combined comparative research on natural-resource governance in the Brazilian Amazon with postgraduate training, researcher mobility, joint fieldwork, and international academic cooperation.

Rather than treating natural-resource management primarily as a technical problem, the project investigated how patterns of resource use emerge from interactions between social relations, institutions, resource characteristics, forms of appropriation, and competing economic and political interests.

Three contrasting configurations were examined: community-based management of renewable aquatic resources in the Lower Amazon; small-scale gold mining in the Tapajós Mineral Province; and corporate responsibility in large-scale bauxite mining in western Pará.

Research Problem

Amazonian natural resources are embedded in increasingly complex relations between local populations, state institutions, corporations, markets, civil-society organizations, and transnational actors.

The project identified three broad processes shaping resource use in the region.

First, growing international demand for commodities and energy was stimulating infrastructure development and the expansion of large-scale agriculture and extractive industries. These processes generated economic opportunities but also transformed access to land and natural resources and produced substantial social and environmental impacts.

Second, traditional populations and organized civil society had developed political strategies to protect or regain access to land and resources, including extractive reserves, Indigenous territories, quilombola territories, and other institutional arrangements.

Third, many resource users operated through less institutionalized forms of appropriation. Small-scale gold miners (garimpeiros) represented a particularly important case: their livelihoods depended on non-renewable resources, while access to mineral deposits and territory frequently combined formal concessions, informal practices, market relations, and collective arrangements.

The project therefore asked how different actors establish and maintain access to natural resources, how formal and informal institutions interact, and how these arrangements affect social and ecological outcomes.

Comparative Research Design

The project adopted a comparative approach designed to move beyond several conventional dichotomies in natural-resource research:

formal versus informal;
renewable versus non-renewable resources;
collective versus private appropriation;
local resource users versus corporations;
small-scale versus large-scale production;
conflict versus cooperation.

Instead of treating these distinctions as fixed categories, the research examined how social context, characteristics of natural resources, institutional arrangements, and systems of appropriation interact dynamically.

This comparative framework was implemented through three interconnected empirical subprojects.

Aquatic Resource Governance in the Lower Amazon

The first subproject investigated the use and management of aquatic resources in the Lower Amazon floodplains.

Floodplain communities had developed local rules for fisheries and other aquatic resources over long periods, while state policies increasingly introduced formal arrangements for community participation and co-management. The coexistence of these systems generated both cooperation and institutional tensions.

The research compared the socioeconomic use of fisheries and other aquatic fauna with the formal and informal rule systems governing those resources. Particular attention was given to the evolving relationships among communities, government agencies, NGOs, and researchers in the construction of co-management institutions.

Small-Scale Gold Mining in the Tapajós

The second subproject examined conflict and cooperation in gold extraction in the Tapajós Mineral Province, one of the historically most important small-scale gold-mining regions in Brazil.

The research addressed conflicts involving local populations, garimpeiros, public authorities, and mining companies. These included competition for mineral resources, conflicts between mining and alternative land uses, and tensions between mineral extraction and environmental conservation.

Particular attention was devoted to the institutional position of small-scale miners. The research examined public policies regulating gold extraction, obstacles to the formalization of mining activities, the role of garimpeiro organizations, and possibilities for cooperation among stakeholders in promoting environmentally and socially more sustainable mining practices.

Corporate Responsibility in Bauxite Mining

The third subproject shifted the analytical perspective from small-scale extraction to large-scale corporate mining.

Using ALCOA's Juruti mine and Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) in Oriximiná as empirical cases, the research investigated Corporate Social Responsibility in the mineral sector.

The study examined how international norms concerning corporate responsibility were translated into Brazilian legal and institutional settings; how mining corporations developed reporting and monitoring practices; how communities, NGOs, local governments, and other stakeholders perceived corporate social programmes; and whether discrepancies existed between corporate representations of social responsibility and stakeholder experiences of corporate activity.

Formality, Informality and Access

A central theoretical concern of the project was the relationship between formal institutions and actual access to natural resources.

The research drew on the literature on common-pool resources and property rights, particularly the work associated with Elinor Ostrom. This perspective demonstrated the importance of formal and informal rights and of resource characteristics for explaining institutional arrangements.

At the same time, the project identified an important limitation: property-rights approaches alone could not adequately explain how power relations and interactions between conflicting actors shape effective access to resources.

The project therefore connected the commons literature with approaches emphasizing access and power, particularly Ribot and Peluso's Theory of Access. Formal state, private, and collective property rights could overlap, while actual resource use depended upon wider social relationships and formal and informal partnerships.

This shifted the analytical question from simply asking who formally owns or controls a resource towards asking who is effectively able to gain, maintain, negotiate, or defend access to it.

Research Cooperation and Academic Training

The project was conceived not only as a research programme but also as an institutional framework for strengthening long-term academic cooperation between Brazil and the Netherlands.

UFPA/NAEA and CEDLA brought complementary research traditions to the partnership. Both institutions had established research programmes dealing with natural resources, environmental conflicts, and Amazonian development, while combining researchers based in the region with researchers observing Amazonian transformations from international research environments.

The approved cooperation framework envisaged:

joint Brazilian–Dutch fieldwork;
research workshops and seminars;
postgraduate courses and short courses;
joint supervision of postgraduate researchers;
doctoral sandwich fellowships at CEDLA;
researcher mobility between Belém and Amsterdam;
preparation of international peer-reviewed publications;
exploration of cotutelle or double-degree arrangements.

The CAPES project registration envisaged six doctoral sandwich fellowships as well as multiple research missions over the four-year cooperation period.

Several publications produced within the overlapping research environment during this period addressed closely related questions, particularly small-scale gold mining, formalization and resource governance. Because these publications cannot be attributed exclusively to CAPES–NUFFIC, and several were also associated with GOMIAM, they are not presented here as specific outputs of this project.

My Role

I served as Brazilian Project Coordinator, coordinating the UFPA/NAEA component of the international research cooperation together with Marjo de Theije at CEDLA.

In addition to overall project coordination, I was directly involved in the research on small-scale gold mining and natural-resource governance in the Tapajós Mineral Province, particularly questions concerning public policy, formalization, conflicts over mineral and territorial resources, organizations of small-scale miners, and possibilities for stakeholder cooperation.

Connection with GOMIAM

The CAPES–NUFFIC cooperation developed within an existing international research relationship between members of the Brazilian and Dutch teams.

A particularly important connection existed with GOMIAM — Gold Mining in the Amazon, the comparative international research programme on small-scale gold mining, conflict and cooperation in Amazonia. Several researchers participated in both research environments, and the CAPES–NUFFIC subproject on small-scale gold mining in the Tapajós addressed closely related questions concerning formalization, resource access, conflict and cooperation.

The two projects remained institutionally distinct, but their temporal and intellectual overlap strengthened comparative research and cooperation between the Brazilian and Dutch teams.

Contribution to My Research Trajectory

In retrospect, three questions emerging from this research became particularly important in my subsequent work on mining, public policy, natural-resource governance, and regional development in Amazonia.

Earlier work on gold mining had focused particularly on the relations between international markets, the Brazilian state, regional transformations, nature, and labour relations in Amazonian garimpo. The CAPES–NUFFIC project broadened this perspective through systematic comparison between different resources, production systems, actor constellations, and institutional arrangements.

Access. Formal rights alone do not determine who benefits from natural resources. Effective access depends not only on formal rights but also on social relations, institutional arrangements, power relations and the capacity of actors to negotiate and maintain access to resources.

Mediation. The research increasingly directed attention toward the role of public agencies, corporations, associations, communities and NGOs in shaping access, cooperation and conflict around natural resources.

Global–regional relations. Resource use in Amazonia cannot be understood exclusively at the local or national level. Commodity markets, international standards, corporate practices, environmental norms, and transnational networks become consequential through specific regional configurations.

These questions subsequently contributed to my work on responsible mining, regional development, and the relationship between global societal processes and regional transformation.

The trajectory is not a simple sequence of successive projects. Several initiatives overlapped temporally and intellectually. Together, however, they progressively expanded the analytical perspective from particular mining practices towards questions of resource access, governance, organizational mediation, responsibility, and the regional consequences of globally structured processes.

From Resource Access and Governance to Regional Development in World Society

The CAPES–NUFFIC project was not conceived within the later theoretical framework of Regional Development in World Society. Its relevance to the current programme is therefore retrospective.

The comparative research nevertheless generated observations that later became important for questions concerning access, organizations and regional differentiation. Formal rules did not determine resource use by themselves. Their consequences depended on historically established social relations, organizations, resource characteristics and the different capacities of actors to secure and maintain access.

The project also demonstrated that processes extending beyond particular regions—including commodity markets, environmental regulation and international corporate-responsibility standards—became consequential through specific institutional and organizational arrangements in the Lower Amazon, the Tapajós and western Pará.

From the perspective of my current research, these cases provide empirical material for examining how heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected within regional configurations and generate differentiated possibilities of access, participation and resource use.

Retrospective analytical relevance:
Resource access · Formal and informal institutions · Organizations · Power relations · Global standards · Resource characteristics · Regional differentiation