The Roads through the Forest

Chapter 4 focuses on the legacy of modernization-oriented planning processes, which are reinforced through transposition into the language and logics of sustainable development planning concerning how lands bordering the Transamazon and BR-163 highways will be protected, even as those roads are paved. The experiences of sustainable development explored in this chapter reveal how techno-managerial coordination and institutional capacity plays out on vulnerable landscapes and frequently marginalized populations, with consequences that are full of friction and imbalanced privilege. They also reveal how historically constituted relationships and understandings of modernity inform development projects, often reproducing long-standing inequalities.

Conclusion

For many, the Xingu River basin continues to be a site where projections of big dreams for attaining wealth and opportunity simultaneously collide with cultural losses and landscape transformation. The conclusion of the book, Chapter 7, zooms back out to explore the sustainable development framework as it informs state–society relations and uneven manifestations in lived experiences of place. The conclusion also examines prospects for the transformative potential of sustainable development as a utopic vision and offers reflections on the possibilities for sustainable development discourse to become more deeply emancipatory through adopting a new metaphor, involving embroilment—as a means of better grasping the fundamental realities of the concept as it is practiced.

The Land in the Middle

Chapter 5 explores the creation of conservation areas in the region known as the Terra do Meio, a process that involved the collaborations of state actors with local and international civil society groups and ultimately transformed a region of substantial isolation and lawlessness into one of the world’s largest and most important biodiversity corridors. The chapter highlights how the sustainable development forms taking shape suggest how territories of conservation are circumscribed by strategic alliances and political moments and entail different, often contradictory, ideas of place and identity that are articulated by different actors.

Capital in the Jungle

Chapter 2 traces the ideational struggles over the Brazilian Amazon from the early explorations of the region by non-indigenous explorers into the 1980s. The chapter specifically highlights the important theoretical undercurrents of how seeing the tropics and the push for modernity in Amazonia became manifested through grandiose development projects and deeply symbolic exertions of state power. This chapter situates the Amazon region as a space fraught with the tension between ecological concerns and state economic planning priorities which often take uneven, incomplete, and erratic forms. These make lasting marks on the landscapes and societal structures in that region, and ultimately provide the ideational foundation for later sustainable development articulations.

Introduction

The introductory chapter highlights the significance of studying sustainable development, introducing it as a concept that significantly marks approaches to environmental protection, economic growth, and social well-being in the present day. It highlights the main arguments of the entire book, which is first that sustainable development should be thought of as an ongoing set of processes that involve embroilments, rather than a point of balanced stasis where a particular goal has been reached. Centrally, the central argument of this book is that with few exceptions, sustainable development ultimately serves to reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities and yields highly uneven social and environmental results. The socio-natures of Amazonian realities show how injections of capital and state influence produce disproportionately consolidates the power of capital and the state, even as they are contested by members of civil society. The chapter situates the research presented in the book in theoretical context, building upon notions of socio-nature from the field of geography, and drawing upon environmental governance literatures in anthropology and political science to lay the foundations for interrogating sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon.

Sustainable Development Meets the Amazon

Chapter 3 focuses centrally on the host of plans and policies for sustainable development conducted in Brazil beginning in the late 1980s, when the concept of sustainable development was introduced into the mainstream of global environmental politics. The chapter also elaborates on the contemporary major players of Amazonian sustainable development politics, focusing on the roles and historical formations of the Catholic Church, social movement groups, and activism in relation to various projects and socio-environmental struggles of the late 1980s and into contemporary times. Illustrative cases of Brazilian infrastructure and developmental priorities for the Amazon are discussed in order to illustrate the primacy of national integration and consolidation of state power—in other words, economic priorities with a strong modernization orientation—well beyond environmental protection and social equity considerations.

The River

In Chapter 6, competing visions behind sustainable development articulations are analyzed based on the case study of the Belo Monte hydroelectric project, which is located along the Xingu River. The chapter reveals how the framework of sustainable development promotes the logics of state planning for the promotion of macro-economic and growth-oriented goals, while concealing the social and environmental consequences of the infrastructure under the auspices of democratic engagement. In order to structure this chapter’s exposition of what is one of the world’s most controversial dams, the discussion is organized around three central arenas, all of which contributed to the creation and perpetuation of the sustainable development narrative surrounding Belo Monte: the legal disputes, civil society activism, and global-level policies over hydroelectric dams. The chapter concludes with a critical analysis of the divergence between articulations of sustainable development in its idealized form and the mismatched shortfalls that were present in reality.