Leibniz Lab Systemic Sustainability — Belém Pilot Region

Systemic Sustainability, Regional Innovation and Food-System Transformation in the Brazilian Amazon

2025–2027 · Leibniz Lab Systemic Sustainability · ZMT · UFPA/NAEA · International Research Cooperation · Brazilian Amazon

Systemic Sustainability · Biodiversity · Climate · Agriculture · Food Systems · Regional Innovation · Bioeconomy · Knowledge · Amazonia

Project Overview

The Belém Pilot Region is the Brazilian Amazon component of the Leibniz Lab “Systemic Sustainability” (LL-SYSTAIN), a Leibniz research initiative addressing the interconnected challenges. addressing the interconnected challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change, agriculture and food systems.

The Leibniz Lab brings together expertise from 41 Leibniz research institutions and 11 research clusters and works through four international pilot regions: Berlin/Brandenburg in Germany, the Kilimanjaro region in Tanzania, the Hanoi region in Vietnam, and Belém in the Brazilian Amazon.

The Belém pilot builds on a long-standing research cooperation between the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA), particularly the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos (NAEA), as well as cooperation with societal actors in the coastal and northeastern Brazilian Amazon.

My participation in the project takes place through the UFPA/NAEA research environment of the Belém pilot. The available project documentation supports my participation but does not establish a specific formal function such as pilot-region coordinator or principal investigator; no such designation is therefore used here.

The Systemic Sustainability Challenge

LL-SYSTAIN starts from the premise that major sustainability challenges cannot adequately be understood or addressed independently of one another.

Agricultural production affects biodiversity and climate, while biodiversity loss and climate change create new risks for agriculture and food security. Responses in one field can therefore generate consequences in others.

The Lab addresses these interdependencies through four closely connected fields:

Biodiversity · Climate · Agriculture · Food

Rather than treating sustainability as a collection of separate sectoral problems, the research seeks to understand interactions, feedbacks and potential conflicts between them and to identify approaches capable of contributing to broader processes of systemic transformation.

An important element of this approach is the combination of scientific and societal knowledge. Regional requirements and experiences are brought into relation with wider scientific knowledge and global developments, while the pilot regions provide empirical settings for identifying and examining possible pathways toward systemic sustainability.

The Brazilian Amazon as a Pilot Region

The Brazilian pilot is identified within the wider project as Belém / Brazilian Amazon, with project documentation also referring to Belém / Bragança.

In practice, the empirical field extends beyond the city of Belém. Research and case documentation include initiatives in the metropolitan and island environments of Belém as well as in northeastern Pará and other Amazonian production regions.

This wider regional perspective is important because food systems connect different territorial settings: agricultural and extractive production areas, communities, cooperatives, processing activities, markets, research organizations and urban consumers.

The pilot region therefore provides a setting for examining how sustainability challenges and innovations become connected across different organizations, production systems, knowledge practices and territorial contexts.

Regional Innovations for Systemic Sustainability

A major strand of the Belém pilot concerns the identification and analysis of regional sustainability innovations.

The research takes a deliberately broad understanding of innovation. Relevant innovations are not restricted to new technologies. They can also involve new combinations of ecological knowledge, production practices, organizational arrangements, material flows, market relations and forms of cooperation.

The documented cases consequently encompass several forms of innovation, including:

biodiversity-based production and conservation;
agroforestry and agroecological production;
cooperative and community organization;
alternative producer–consumer relations;
circular use of agricultural and food-processing residues;
bioeconomy and biomass technologies;
local and traditional knowledge;
women-led productive and extractive organizations.

The diversity of these cases makes it possible to investigate sustainability innovation not as a single technological trajectory but as a heterogeneous field of attempts to reorganize relationships among natural resources, production, organizations, knowledge, markets and consumption.

Innovation Gallery

The Innovation Gallery is an important research and knowledge-transfer component of the Belém pilot.

It identifies and documents initiatives from northern Brazil that address different dimensions of sustainable food systems and regional transformation. Project materials include case documentation, field visits, interviews and transcripts, literature and material prepared for digital presentation.

The Gallery makes it possible to compare initiatives that would otherwise normally be treated within separate fields of research.

Examples include women-led extractive organizations, agroecological consumer networks, agroforestry systems, cooperatives and technological initiatives for transforming agricultural residues into new products.

Rather than functioning simply as a showcase of successful projects, the Gallery provides an empirical basis for asking what kinds of innovation emerge in particular regional settings, how they are organized, which forms of knowledge they mobilize and under what conditions they may contribute to wider sustainability transformations.

Biodiversity, Local Knowledge and Women's Organizations

Several cases demonstrate how biodiversity conservation can become connected to livelihoods, local knowledge and collective organization.

On Combu Island, the research documents initiatives associated with women extractivists and the use of forest resources such as andiroba. These practices connect productive activities with local ecological knowledge, community organization and the maintenance of cultural knowledge.

The Mulheres Amigas das Abelhas initiative provides another example. Meliponiculture connects the conservation of native pollinators with agroforestry, biodiversity, income generation and women's participation. The documented initiative includes the expansion of meliponiculture activities on Combu and Cotijuba islands.

Such cases make visible forms of innovation in which ecological and social processes cannot readily be separated.

Agroforestry and Cooperative Innovation

The research also examines established productive organizations capable of connecting regional production with wider markets.

An important case is CAMTA in Tomé-Açu. Its historical trajectory demonstrates a long-term transition from specialized agricultural production toward diversified agroforestry systems.

The case combines ecological diversification with cooperative organization, processing, knowledge accumulation and market integration. It therefore provides an opportunity to examine how a regional production system changes over time and how organizational structures can contribute to stabilizing and disseminating new productive practices.

Other documented cases extend this perspective to smaller agroecological producers, associations and cooperatives in northeastern Pará.

Alternative Food-System Organization

Sustainability innovation can also occur through changes in the organization of relationships between production and consumption.

The Grupo para Consumo Agroecológico (GRUCA) provides an example of an alternative food network connecting consumers with family farmers, traditional communities and women's groups.

Its organizational principles include direct producer–consumer relationships, transparency, self-organization and horizontal cooperation. The case therefore shifts attention from innovation in individual products toward innovation in the social and organizational architecture of food systems.

This dimension is particularly relevant to systemic sustainability because changes in production practices alone may be insufficient if commercialization, consumption and value-chain relations remain unchanged.

Circular Bioeconomy and Material Flows

Other cases focus on the transformation of residues generated by Amazonian production systems.

Projects associated with Sustenbioenergy investigate the use of residues from products such as açaí and tucumã for bio-oil, biofuels, biogas, biochar and other applications. The available documentation indicates development extending toward prototypes and technology-transfer possibilities.

Related initiatives examine the use of açaí seeds as biomass, transforming a major residue stream of the regional food economy into a potential resource.

These cases introduce a material-flow dimension into the research: regional sustainability depends not only on what is produced but also on what happens to the materials and residues generated through production, processing and consumption.

Research Approach

The Belém pilot combines systemic sustainability research with regional case identification and empirical documentation.

The documented research process includes case identification, site visits, interviews, documentary research, case documentation and the preparation of material for comparative and digital presentation. The project archive contains field materials and interview transcripts concerning several of the initiatives included in the Innovation Gallery.

The emerging comparative approach allows different types of innovation to be examined across common analytical questions:

What problem does an initiative address? How is it organized? Which resources and forms of knowledge does it mobilize? How does it connect production, environment and markets? At what territorial scale does it operate? What limits its expansion or transfer?

This creates a basis for moving from the description of individual initiatives toward comparative analysis of the conditions under which regional innovations can contribute to systemic sustainability.

My Research within the Belém Pilot

Within the Belém pilot, my research is particularly concerned with regional development, Amazonian transformation, organizations, society–nature relations and sustainability.

This raises questions concerning how innovations become connected to markets and public institutions, how scientific and local knowledge interact, how organizations stabilize particular practices, and why apparently promising innovations may develop very differently in different regional settings.

The Innovation Gallery is particularly relevant to this research because it allows heterogeneous initiatives to be compared without assuming in advance that they represent a single model of sustainable development.

Emerging Research Questions

The Belém pilot raises several questions that are relevant beyond the individual cases.

How can locally developed innovations contribute to transformations extending beyond their immediate place of origin?

Which organizations and networks enable innovations to become stabilized, replicated or connected to wider markets and policies?

How do scientific knowledge, local knowledge and practical experience interact in defining what counts as a sustainability innovation?

Which material, organizational and institutional conditions enable or constrain the transition from individual initiatives toward broader transformation pathways?

And how do interventions aimed at biodiversity, agriculture, climate or food systems generate consequences in the other dimensions of systemic sustainability?

These questions connect the empirical Innovation Gallery with the broader systemic architecture of LL-SYSTAIN.

Contribution to My Current Research

The ongoing Belém pilot intersects with several areas of my current research on regional development, organizations, society–nature relations and sustainability.

The Innovation Gallery provides empirical material for research on organizations and regional innovation. Agroforestry, extractivism and circular bioeconomy cases contribute to research on society–nature relations and materiality. Producer organizations and alternative food networks raise questions concerning market integration and organizational mediation. The comparison of heterogeneous initiatives provides material for analysing regional differentiation.

The project therefore creates an empirical research environment in which questions developed in different parts of my research can be investigated together.

Connection with Regional Development in World Society

LL-SYSTAIN was not developed as an application of Regional Development in World Society (RWS). The two research frameworks should therefore remain analytically distinct.

The Belém pilot nevertheless provides a particularly relevant empirical field for my current theoretical research.

Global concerns about biodiversity, climate change, sustainable agriculture and food security do not become regionally consequential in uniform ways. They become connected to Amazonian regional configurations through research programmes, policies, technologies, markets and organizational initiatives.

The Innovation Gallery makes some of these connections empirically observable. Cooperatives, associations, research organizations, enterprises and community initiatives can connect locally embedded practices with scientific knowledge, environmental expectations, markets, technologies and public institutions.

From an RWS perspective, the relevant question is therefore not whether a particular innovation is intrinsically “sustainable,” but how it becomes selected, organized, stabilized and consequential within a regional configuration and whether connections established in one domain generate further consequences in others.

The Belém pilot consequently provides an empirical setting for examining how heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected within Amazonian regional configurations and how organizations and knowledge contribute to those connections.

Current analytical relevance:
Organizations · Knowledge · Innovation · Materiality · Society–nature relations · Selective connectivity · Regional differentiation · Transformation

The relationship between LL-SYSTAIN and RWS should therefore be understood as an empirical and analytical interface, not as theoretical identity.