Contentious Land Change in the Amazon's Arc of Deforestation

Land change in the Amazon is driven by numerous factors including fiscal incentives, infrastructure, transportation costs, migration, and household decision making. Largely missing from the story to date, however, is the role of contentious social processes, including contention over land resources. By employing a case study of land conflict over a largeholding in southeastern Para, Brazil, and a regional-scale statistical model, we describe contentious land change (C-LC) in an area with a long history of antagonism between largeholders and the rural poor. We fuse the conceptual frameworks of political ecology with the methodological approaches of land change science to show that deforestation in the area of study is enhanced due to the interaction of diverse and adversarial agents rather than the independent actions of isolated land managers deforesting according to the dictates of microeconomic optimization. C-LC is a process of global reach and must therefore be added to the topical range of land change science. A combination of the explanatory richness of political ecology with the methodological rigor of land change science greatly enhances our understanding of land change processes.