Ecological rationality and environmental governance on the agrarian frontier: The role of religion in the Brazilian Amazon

Journal of Rural Studies 32 (2013) 411e419

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Ecological rationality and environmental governance on the agrarian frontier: The role of religion in the Brazilian Amazon Kei Otsuki* United Nations University Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP), 53-70, Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8925, Japan

a b s t r a c t Keywords: Agrarian frontier Ecological rationality Environmental governance Religion Brazil Amazon

The conventional understanding of environmental governance implicitly assumes a priori presence of citizen rationality that underpins constitution of civil society vis-à-vis state. This assumption tends to overlook the economic and ecological consequences of social interactions through which people with diverse forms of rationality gradually produce distinction between state and society and shape environmental governance as an embedded process. This paper presents a case study of spontaneous settlers called posseiros in the south-east of the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon and examines ways that their social interactions lead to the so-called emancipation movements for municipal making on the agrarian frontier and open civic places in which environmental governance is negotiated. It pays particular attention to the role of religion, especially the Pentecostal Church of Assembly of God in relation to the traditional Catholic Church, in influencing the posseiros’ ecological rationality and the articulation of emancipation movements and argues that the focus on religion sheds new light on the linkage between the environment, livelihoods and local governance. The paper concludes by discussing pragmatic implications of the case study for promoting sustainable rural development. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction While scopes and focuses vary, recent studies on participatory politics and governance have widely used an analytical framework that assumes a priori presence of people’s rationality to organize civil society vis-à-vis state. For example, this assumption is clearly seen in the number of studies on social movements in rural Brazil where “state” usually implies multilevel governmental institutions; and “society” is represented by social movements that claim the need for agrarian reform or environmental justice from the state through political participation, such as the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), extraction workers’ and indigenous people’s movements (Baud et al., 2011; Chase, 2010; Wittman, 2009; Wolford, 2010). These movements’ apparent success in forwarding the political agenda of nationwide agrarian reform and demarcation of protected areas in Brazil has shown that the dualistic state-society framework has been effective in ensuring equitable and sustainable rural development (Hochstetler and Keck, 2007; Ondetti, 2008; see also Li, 2002; Woods, 2008). However, this state-society framework becomes awkward when we explore participatory forms of environmental governance

* Tel.: þ81 3 5467 1352; fax: þ81 3 3406 7347. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected]. 0743-0167/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.09.003

where “the interplay between different forms of politics and other social interactions” takes place processually and does not easily fit into the strategized state-society distinction (Baud et al., 2011: 85). This is the case of the Amazon region of Brazil, to which the world’s largest remaining rainforest belongs. In the Amazon,1 90 percent of more than 230,000 km2 of land used for agrarian reform is occupied by spontaneous settlers known as posseiros who hold provisional land titles or occupation licenses issued by the state (Brandão Jr. and Souza Jr., 2006; Hammond, 1999; Miranda, 1988). They are known to be individualistic compared to members of the wellorganized rural social movements such as the MST, as they tacitly “invade the land, leave the land . [and] . enter again, but always in a disorganized fashion” (Branford and Rocha, 2002: 134). While they do claim property rights from the state, they do not readily assume the clear distinction between the state (them) and the society (us) for claiming purposes in the same strategic manner as the social movements. They rather spontaneously colonize the available land and forest without always aiming at redistribution of concentrated land ownership (Hoefle, 2003; Simmons et al., 2010).

1 Amazon here indicates Legal Amazon consisting of seven northern states (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, Tocantins) and parts of the state of Maranhão (north-east) and Mato Grosso (center-west).

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The spontaneous colonization in the Amazon is considered to have a large environmental impact because it takes place as the posseiros clear forests, open their plots and start cattle ranching in the interior where they can play by the “politics of the state absence” (Hochstetler and Keck, 2007: 151). On the face of it, the posseiros seem to be contributing to weak “frontier governance,” which is one of the major obstacles for the state to effectively enforce environmental laws (such as requiring 80% of a rural property to be a forest reserve) or for environmental activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to promote intensive and collective land use for sustainable environmental management (such as community-based agroforestry systems) (Nepstad et al., 2002; Pichón and Uquillas, 1999). However, it can be also argued that weak frontier governance is undergirded by precarious physical infrastructure such as roads and means to store and commercialize sustainable agricultural produce, leaving the posseiros with cattle ranching or land and forest speculation as their only profitable livelihood options even after they obtained their property rights (Bicalho and Hoefle, 2008; Fearnside, 2005). As a consequence, deforestation frontiers keep on expanding. In order to control the posseiros’ agrarian struggles and enhance the state presence on the frontier, experts and policymakers tend to promote militarization of interventions and duly enforce environmental laws and spatial planning while admitting its difficulty (Pacheco, 2009; Tollefson, 2008). One simple problem associated with this militarization approach is that it clarifies little about posseiros’ rationality behind how they wish their society and environment to be governed. As their society has been evolving in the state absence, they are unlikely to readily claim or carry out citizen obligation to comply with official interventions regarding environmental management. The current framework of governance that inherently assumes a priori presence of the clear state-society distinction is unable to take account of the posseiros’ rationality that often leads to the gradual making of a civic place where they negotiate locally embedded forms of governance (cf. Taylor and Cheng, 2012). For instance, even an apparently alternative proposal for a “hybrid” (or adaptive) form of environmental governance in the Amazon recommends that “the state provides public resources to support local governance” while “communities formulate locally appropriate rules based on planning deliberations among stakeholders” such as policymakers, NGOs and scientists (Perz et al., 2008:, 1892; see also Boyd, 2008). The question of how the disorganized posseiros come to establish their “communities” and formulate rules and then situate themselves in relation to “local governance” and “the state” to claim the public resources is left unanswered. This paper argues that this question is in fact vital for us to explore the relationship between governance and rationality of particular rural populations such as posseiros whose activities organizing livelihoods significantly influence environmental sustainability. Here, rationality indicates subjectivity of individuals who shape social processes, which evolve into “political processes through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced” (Mitchell, 1999: 77). The ecological rationality indicates subjectivity of individuals in a particular place to decide on how to deal with the surrounding natural environment, articulate institutional arrangements of governance, and deliberate on environmental management. The question at this point is: How does such an ecological rationality begin to be formed and influence the social interactions in the first place? This paper elaborates on a case study of a posseiros’ spontaneous settlement in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon and proposes looking specifically into the role of religion in formation of the rationality. In recent years, the role of religion in development has been actively debated (Deneulin and Rakodi, 2011; Jones and Petersen, 2011; Rakodi, 2012). Once being simply “subsumed under the category of ‘civil society’,” religion as a locus of free association

and group identification regained scholarly attention in the context of global development (Berger, 2001: 453). However, the relationship between civil society, religion and the state has not yet been sufficiently explored in the context of rural development. For example, in Brazil, it is well known that the Catholic Church has ideologically undergirded the organized social movements through its Pastoral Land Commission (Commisão Pastoral da Terra, or CPT), whose offices were widely implemented across Brazil during the military regime (Esterci, 2004; Wolford, 2003). Nevertheless, questions such as how this Catholic influence is related to newer influences of Protestantism (or Pentecostalism), or how the Protestantism affects the ways that the non-organized and non-indigenous settlers, such as the posseiros, make their community and manage their environment have been little addressed (except for Hoefle, 1999, 2009; Scott, 1979). In addition, the ongoing debates on environmental citizenship, which largely focus on identity politics and participatory governance (Latta and Wittman, 2010), mention little about the relationship between individual belief, community building and civic placemaking observed on agrarian frontiers. On the other hand, the recent literature on rural development in the Amazon asserts that individual identification with a community constitutes a core element for the analyst to understand diversifying forms of agrarian frontier expansion and environmental governance (Browder et al., 2008; Simmons et al., 2010). Religious belief (and non-belief) tacitly but clearly links an individual to a group, indicating possibilities of “multi-scalar” collaboration as well as contradictions between various actors who have different world views and ideologies (Bicalho and Hoefle, 2010). As the case study below shows, the Pentecostal Church is increasingly uniting the individualistic posseiros and helping them to interact with others and to gradually make a civic place. In the Amazon, the civic placemaking process has been observed as the so-called “emancipation movement for municipal making” (movimento de emancipação dos municípios, hereafter, emancipation movement), through which the settlers justified their ecological rationality and came to form institutions of environmental governance “as [an] embedded process” (Taylor and Cheng, 2012: 110). Methodologically speaking, looking at the evolvement of emancipation movements requires an understanding of “largescale. [political]. processes that do not lose connection with the persons on the ground” (Kapferer, 2006: 145). Anthropologists have studied this multi-scalar connection through a “semi-autonomous social field” that extends “between the body politic and the individual” (Moore, 2000[1973]: 56) and in which “the movement of particular individuals through a variety of contexts” can be observed (Kapferer, 2006: 145). Taking insights from such anthropological studies, the case study in this paper describes social events, which represent the “variety of contexts” that allowed individual posseiros with different religious beliefs to interact with each other and negotiate their rationality with reference to the ecological and political economic dynamics. More specifically, the case study introduces life histories of two political leaders emerging at the social events in a district called Novo Paraíso and the surrounding settlement projects on the border between municipalities of São Geraldo do Araguaia and Eldorado dos Carajás in the south-east of Pará state (see Fig. 1). One leader is a pastor of the Church of Assembly of God2; and the other

2 The official English name of this denomination is “Assemblies of God” and initially the Brazilians adopted the direct translation (Assembléias de Deus). However, to show the Church’s unity, the Brazilian headquarters decided to make the official name Assmbléia de Deus or, Assembly of God. Therefore, this paper adopts this contemporary Brazilian translation. See d’Avila (2006: 39) for details of the “plural or singular” debate in Brazil and also www.assmbleia.org.br for the Brazilian Assembly of God Church’s website.

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Fig. 1. Location of Novo Paraíso in the state of Pará, Brazil.

is a non-religious ex-syndicate leader. The data about their interactions were collected through interviews and direct observations conducted intermittently from 2000 to 2002 and 2004 to 2005. The field material is analyzed with reference to documents of emancipation movements compiled by the Association of Municipalities in Araguaia and Tocantins (Associação dos Municipios do Araguaia e Tocantins, or AMAT), collected between 2010 and 2011 (AMAT, 1996; AMAT-Carajás, 2012).3 Before presenting the case study, however, the paper first needs to review literature on the state-society relations and emancipation movements in the Amazonian spontaneous settlements in order to clarify the analytical problems that the focus on religion specifically seeks to address. 2. State-society relations in the Brazilian Amazon4 The relationship between the state and society in the Brazilian Amazon was first approached by political economists who criticized the state-led modernization projects implemented during the 1970s and 1980s. The military regime in power then was considered to be expanding capitalism into the forests and progressively impoverishing and inflicting violence on “victims” such as indigenous forest users, rubber tappers, and posseiros (Bunker, 1985; Foweraker, 1981). The expansion of capitalism, underpinned by mineral extraction and new cattle ranching projects imported from the south of Brazil, led to extensive deforestation (Hecht and Cockburn, 1989; Hurrell, 1991), and the notion of the economic and deforestation “frontier” became central to these early studies (Cleary, 1993). The early political economic studies positioned the emerging frontier society of the “victims” against the state-backed capitalist “villains.” However, newer studies started to reveal that complex patterns of social organization had appeared from the unavoidable contestations between the “victims” and “villains,” leading to a new Amazonian society (Cleary, 1993). After all, the “victims” did not stay victimized but formed “subordinate groups” and acquired “a greater number of alternative channels to pursue their political objectives: via unions, federations, nongovernmental organizations, and political parties,” as well as via tacit networks configured by “cultural repertoires and historical traditions of everyday life and collective resistance” (Schmink and Wood, 1992: 353). For the new settlers like posseiros, such alternative channels were largely underpinned by the National Workers’ Union (Central

3 In 2011, AMAT changed its name to AMAT-Carajás. This association has the political goal of splitting off from the state of Pará and instituting the state of Carajás, with 38 member municipalities. 4 Different versions of this review appear in Otsuki (2011, 2012).

Única dos Trabalhadores, or CUT), founded in 1983. The CUT instituted an agricultural workers’ federation in each state and a rural workers’ syndicate (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores Rurais, hereafter STR) in every municipality. In the south of Brazil, MST was officially initiated at this time but had not yet reached the Amazon.5 Thus, STRs were the only available mechanism through which the settlers were able to register at the nearest municipalities to their occupying lots while claiming property rights and credits through agrarian reform. However, their lots were mostly situated hundreds of kilometers from the municipality and STR headquarters, and the growing population started to demand their own municipalities to locate centers of public services, such as schools, health posts, and better roads, closer to their lots. The emancipation movements thus began to be widely generated across the agrarian reform settlements. As the new constitution came into force in 1988 to guarantee redemocratization and facilitate decentralization in Brazil, the settlers’ claiming of municipalities was mostly accepted. As the next section discusses in detail, in every general election between 1988 and 2000, new municipalities were demarcated through the emancipation movements. However, they were susceptible to patronage politics and newly replicated clientelism and largely remained underdeveloped, being unable to provide sufficient public services and infrastructure such as roads for commercialization of the agricultural produce to the posseiros-turned-citizens (Hoefle, 2000). The interior municipalities’ incapacities led the new settlers in the Amazon to repeat the “boom-and-bust” cycle of forest encroachment, land occupation, claiming of land titles and new municipalities as well as the pasture plantation and land speculation, causing deforestation frontiers to continue expanding to this day (Rodrigues et al., 2009). Meanwhile, at the occasion of the Earth Summit in 1992, national and international policies started to introduce a wide range of environmental management projects to the Amazon, arguing for stronger environmental law enforcement and community-based natural resource management, primarily to promote more intensive use of land than pasture development. The newly introduced projects addressed the importance of capacity development for the settlers who did not possess “traditional knowledge” of the collective forest use (Pichón and Uquillas, 1999). At the same time, influenced by the growing field of institutional economics, the lack of the settlers’ capacity to engage in environmental management began to be analyzed in terms of the institutional failure of the state to secure “timely, low-cost, and clear” individual property rights for “the effective management of the Amazon frontier” (Alston et al.,

5 The first MST occupation in the Amazon took place in 1990 (Branford and Rocha, 2002).

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1999: 23; see also Barreto et al., 2008). As the well-known “tragedy of the commons” thesis argued (Hardin, 1968), the assumption was that, if the open-access situation were resolved through the individual property rights enforcement in the Amazon, each settler would rationally comply with the land use planning and sustainable settlement management (Little, 2001). This compliance did not always happen (Campari, 2005). The official institutions providing the individual property rights did not help the settlers to access markets for products harvested from the intensive agriculture or to properly process and package fresh produce. Most of the time, the settlers needed more engaging technical assistance from agricultural extension agencies or NGOs to sustainably develop their production and commercialization. The STR in each municipality was expected to request the assistance on behalf of the posseiros but, as we see below, it usually stopped functioning properly after a municipality was instituted. The new municipalities in turn continued to struggle even to attend to the requests for providing basic services, let alone assistance for sustainable agriculture. Under this circumstance, the settlers kept on engaging in their local development both individually and collectively within their societal context. A recent review of frontier expansion in the Amazon concludes that “understanding the central importance of locality,” undergirded by “local agency, institutional histories and the actions of individual people,” will be essential for us to understand the ongoing development and to promote environmental management in the setters’ society (Browder et al., 2008: 1489). In this regard, municipal governance and emancipation movements deserve more attention because they manifest the posseiros’ own engagement with construction of their society in relation to the state in a particular locality. Even when the movements do not actually result in demarcation of a new municipality, they work to open a new civic place in which people with different world views continue to interact and seek after pragmatic approaches to environmental governance. The state of Pará in the eastern Amazon has experienced a series of emancipation movements, especially since redemocratization. Looking into details of how the movements have been taking place, roles of the Catholic and Pentecostal churches begin to be identified. 3. Emancipation movements and churches in Pará Originally, a few extensive municipalities were designated in Pará in the nineteenth century following the Portuguese colonial land distribution system known as sesmaria. Within these municipalities, mostly covered with primary forest, agricultural and extractive settlements and catechist colonies were created. At the end of the nineteenth century, commercialization of natural rubber led to an economic boom in the Amazon, and the southern part of Pará, penetrated by the Araguaia and Tocantins Rivers leading to Belém, the Pará’s state capital, momentarily became one of the centers of the boom (Mattos, 1996; Velho, 1973). This “rubber boom” attracted traders and extraction workers, who settled and expanded new settlement centers. In 1913, one of these centers became the municipal center of Marabá in the southeast of the state, which was split off from the sesmaria-based municipality of Baião; in 1935, Conceição do Araguaia was further split off from Marabá (Ianni, 1981 [1978]). In 1947, two municipalities e Itupiranga and Tucuruí e were also created out of Marabá. After the rubber boom went bust, these four early municipalities became centers of Brazil nut extraction and small-scale mining, attracting seasonal nut collectors and miners who opened new extraction and agricultural frontiers (Laraia and Matta, 1967; Velho, 1973).

In 1960, the national capital of Brazil was moved from Rio de Janeiro to inland Brasília, closer to the Amazon, and the Beléme Brasília Highway (BR-010) was constructed to cut through the eastern fringe of the Amazon. This highway construction accelerated the building of tributary roads and new highways. Under the developmentalist military regime installed in 1964, which intended to integrate the Amazon with the more developed southern part of Brazil, construction of major highways began. They included the PA-70 highway (today known as the BR-222), the Transamazon Highway (BR-230), and the PA-150, which were used for military operations. In the 1970s, a leftist guerrilla movement called the Araguaia Guerrilla (Guerrilha do Araguaia) became active in the region, and the military regime opened new operation roads to facilitate the fight against the Guerrilla. These military operation roads worked to encourage loggers, ranchers, construction workers, and land seekers like posseiros to advance the agrarian frontiers into forests. Consequently, new settlements cropped up along the newly opened roads and, in the early 1980s, they began to be designated as submunicipal districts by the existing municipal governments. In 1982, four submunicipal districts of Marabá and Conceição do Araguaia, such as Xinguara e often described as an “instant city” (Browder and Godfrey, 1997) e were turned into new municipalities by the Pará state government which wished to manage the ever-growing population on the frontiers. The state government often sent new mayors and councilors to these new municipalities (AMAT-Carajás, 2012). The situation changed in 1983 when the CUT instituted STR in each municipality. The STR became the main alternative channel for the posseiros to make demands about demarcation of their occupied lots. After the collapse of the military regime in 1985, the demands intensified, as they learned that the federal budget would be transferred to a municipality. The settlers became quite eager to get their settlement politically represented and acquire higher chances of accessing the budget. In 1988, their demands resulted in nine new municipalities in the south-east of Pará (implemented in 1989). Since then, in every general election, the elected councilors have sent official requests for creating new municipalities to the State Legislative Assembly.6 Most of these emancipation movements led by STR had strong support from the Catholic Church-based Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). In the south-east of Pará, a new municipality meant the creation of a new parish under the Diocese of Conceição do Araguaia or Marabá and physical construction of a new church, as well as allocation of a priest and a couple of nuns from outside. The new church usually became active in providing basic services such as school meals and primary education. The CPT and the settlers used the church to discuss syndicate matters and, in some cases, such deliberations at the church resulted in creation of another new emancipation movement, as seen in the case of Bom Jesus do Tocantins, split off from Marabá in 1989. While Protestantism had been increasingly popularized in Brazil during the 1980s (Dixon, 1995), its role in the emancipation movements in the interior was not visible until 1992. After the 1992 election, 12 new municipalities were approved and one of them, called Palestina do Pará, was created out of an emancipation movement led by a group of crentes, or believers of the Church of Assembly of God. Originally introduced by two Swedish

6 Brazil, as a federal state, has two types of election: one is the general election (every four years such as 1988, 1992, 1996 .) and the other is the presidential election (also every four years such as 1990, 1994, 1998.). Therefore, the country goes through elections every two years but the emancipation is usually only discussed in the general election year.

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missionaries from the United States to Belém in the 1910s, the Church of Assembly of God rapidly became “the largest Pentecostal denomination in the Western Hemisphere” (Chestnut, 1997: 11). As the mother church was built in Belém, unlike other Protestant churches brought by European migrants to the south of Brazil, the state of Pará represented the center of Assembly of God in Brazil, which experienced “some of the nation’s highest Protestant growth rates” as well as “the highest rations of Pentecostals to mainline Protestants” (Chestnut, 1997: 11). In the 1980s, Assembly of God put up a slogan: “In Brazil, a city [practically indicating a municipality] is a city only when it has post offices, the Bank of Brazil, and Assembly of God” and started to get involved actively in party politics (d’Avila, 2006: 28). According to one study, the Church first sent their representative to the presidential election in 1986, claiming that “our Church has the potential to put one representative in each State Parliament” (Freston quoted in d’Avila, 2006: 28). In 1990, when the Amazon Bank began to require agrarian reform settlers to be members of formal organizations such as producers’ associations and cooperatives in order to access rural credit, these associations, mostly evolved from STRs, worked to link groups of the growing number of crentes on agrarian frontiers to economic and political activities. In the agrarian reform settlement center of Novo Paraíso, a pastor of Assembly of God created a small producers’ association and began to articulate political processes from which an emancipation movement appeared in the 2000s. This movement, which was firmly undergirded by the spontaneous settlers’ ecological rationality, led to a civic place in which the potential direction of environmental governance was proposed. 4. Ecological rationality and environmental governance in Novo Paraíso7 4.1. Church in a spontaneous settlement Novo Paraíso is the urban center of an agrarian reform settlement project called Grotão dos Caboclos and a district of the municipality of São Geraldo do Araguaia (hereafter, São Geraldo). São Geraldo had grown out of an old artisanal mining settlement called Xambioá, situated in today’s state of Tocantins (the state of Goiás until 1988) but then in the municipality of Xinguara in Pará. In the 1970s, workers constructing the military operation roads to combat the Araguaia Guerrilla began to settle, and in the 1980s the prospect of agrarian reform attracted a large number of posseiros to join the settlement. The miners, workers and posseiros shaped a syndicate movement, and an ex-military officer called Lima backed the movement. He insisted on splitting off the locality of Xambioá, now named São Geraldo, from the municipality of Xinguara. In 1988, the state government approved the request, and Lima became São Geraldo’s first mayor. In parallel to this emancipation movement, a group of about 50 posseiros had further headed towards forest reserves for Brazil nut extraction in search of their potential settlement. The group was led by a logger family, an ex-STR leader called Kito, and a pastor of Assembly of God called Limirio. Limirio was born in 1957 in Goiás to a family of a middle-sized landowner and rigorous evangelical believers (crentes); his wife was also from Goiás and a family of crentes. They got married in Goiás in 1984 and entered Pará through Xambioá in 1985. He briefly explained how he decided to come to Pará: “I was married; we were expecting the birth of our son, so I wanted my house and land. It was already too expensive to buy properties around where we

lived in Goiás.”8 In 1985, INCRA started a credit program called the Program of Special Credit for Agrarian Reform for posseiros to build houses and start subsistence agriculture. Limirio said that this program gave hope to those who wished to acquire a house and land in the Amazon. The group first settled in a small Brazil nut extractors’ village situated within a forest reserve of the Bamerindus Ranch, an 80,000-ha property owned by the state-backed Bamerindus Bank. In this first settlement, Limirio opened a “house of prayers” (casa de oração) on his lot. Since the posseiros were continually threatened with eviction by gunmen and the military police sent by the ranch, they became quite religious, and his leadership as a pastor seemed to have been consolidated (Commissão Pastoral da Terra Xinguara, 1987). Soon, the threat forced the group to encroach deeper into the forest and enter another extraction reserve owned by a local oligarch called Mutran. This locality was known as Grotão dos Caboclos, which housed several Brazil nut collectors’ shacks. Limirio rebuilt the house of prayers in Grotão, dug a well, and started to baptize other settlers. As São Geraldo became a municipality, the STR-São Geraldo was created, and the posseiros and the nut collectors used this new STR to press their demand to have Grotão demarcated as an agrarian reform settlement project. In 1988, they initiated political negotiations with the Ministry of Agrarian Reform and Development and succeeded in obtaining a 32,888-ha settlement project described as a PA (Projeto de Assentamento or Settlement Project) for over 600 lots. In 1992, the locality where Limirio’s group first settled within Grotão was officially demarcated as an urban and residential center, with 53 households registered by the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). The pastor Limirio named this center Novo Paraíso (literally, New Paradise) to attach a biblical connotation. As soon as INCRA formalized Novo Paraíso, São Geraldo’s mayor Lima appointed Limirio to be his official community leader. With this appointment, Limirio became de facto submunicipal district leader. However, at this time, Limirio still strongly identified himself as a pastor and strived to consolidate his community around his house of prayer. This identification was effective to unite the settlers who had heavily relied on his church to acquire feelings of security and justice amidst the state absence and violent confrontations with the eviction forces. In addition, the teaching of Assembly of God valued stoic lifestyles, which banned drinking, smoking, decorating houses, going to non-religious festivals and dressing up9 and worked to help the settlers to religiously bear hardships such as the lack of infrastructure and access to public services. Until the Diocese of Conceição do Araguaia recognized Novo Paraíso as its parish in 1995, Limirio’s house of prayers had been the only religious unit in Grotão. Meanwhile, by 1993, the STR-São Geraldo had fragmented, mainly due to the rapid flow of new posseiros into the municipality and internal power struggles. While the settlers in Grotão were still STR members, they began to look for an alternative channel of support for developing their livelihoods. Limirio then encountered a Brazilian NGO based in Belém, supported by the World Bank and the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, which actively promoted adaptive technology for clean water supply and agroforestry plantations in the Amazonian interior (see Otsuki, 2013 for details of this NGO’s projects). Gathering at the municipality headquarters of São Geraldo, the settlers from Novo Paraíso asked the NGO to help them obtain and

8

Interview, 5/5/2000, Novo Paraíso. According to d’Avila (2006), there are different variations within the Church and, therefore, these attributes may not be generalized. 9

7

A different version of this case study appears in Otsuki (2013), Chapter 5.

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effectively use the Amazon Bank’s rural credit. In October 1993, the NGO supported the settlers to organize the Association of Small Producers in Novo Paraíso. With 360 associates, it became one of the first and largest associations in the region. It obtained three lots inside Novo Paraíso, one of which became the headquarters, where a small office was installed and meetings held. Limirio was elected as the first president and the ex-STR leader Kito became the treasurer. As Limirio became busy with the association’s activities, he closed his house of prayers and invited a professional pastor from Goiás to stay at the newly built mother church of Assembly of God in Novo Paraíso. This new mother church building was financed by tithes from the church followers who steadily grew in numbers. In 2000, there were over 1000 houses in Novo Paraíso and 27 houses of prayer of Assembly of God throughout the settlement project of Grotão; and four other Protestant churches began to be active as well (the Congregação Cristã do Brasil; the Seventh Day Adventists; the Pentecostal Church Deus é Amor; and the Evangelho Quadrangular). The rigorous crentes gathered almost every night for worship services, holding bibles in their hands and greeting each other by shaking hands and saying: A Paz do Senhor! (Peace of the Lord!). While not all the settlers were crentes, the thrust of Assembly of God made Grotão distinct from other settlements that were influenced by the Catholic Church (headed by priests sent from outside) or that did not have any religious connotations as uniting elements among the newly arriving settlers. The pastor Limirio shaped the initial social process leading to a community of Novo Paraíso, and this made it easier for those who were already crentes to decide to join this community. And, because Limirio led the small producers’ association, the church-oriented rationality became influential in organizing the settlers’ livelihoods and managing the environment. In this way, Novo Paraíso became one of the most united communities in this region, and the unity eventually led the emerging leaders to claim its emancipation. 4.2. Ecological rationality and political processes As Berger (2001) notes, following Max Weber, Protestantism is historically known to have generated unintended consequences of capitalist accumulation and business development. And, in the Brazilian context, Hoefle (1999: 56) writes that Protestants-led capitalist accumulation has nurtured “a disenchanted view of the natural environment”, which worked to justify forest clearing as a means to convert nature into a city (with a church of Assembly of God). This view is fundamentally different from the ecological rationality influenced by the Catholic Church and increasingly embraced by rural social movements, which has been promoting environmental stewardship and agroecological practices (Botelho and Otsuki, 2012). In Novo Paraíso, the settlers led by Limirio followed the Protestant ethics, constructing their city with a mother church of Assembly of God and houses of prayers by clearing forests, planting crops and pasture and accumulating savings for further investment in farms and cattle. In 2000, each associate in Novo Paraíso had on average 60 heads of cattle on the 100-ha lot with little forests left. In 1995, the NGO sent an extension worker to Novo Paraíso to discourage the extensive pasture development and deforestation by introducing a community-based agroforestry project. The extension worker brought seedlings for the associates to plant tree crops on their lots and eventually to commercialize the harvested crops through community agroindustry managed collectively by the association. At that time, environmental NGOs generally promoted the agroecological ideal of productive conservation and restoration of degraded land through community-based engagement with productive tree plantation and commercialization. Limirio actively took part in the promotion of this project following

training courses at the NGO headquarters since he saw it as a new business opportunity for his community. However, the agroforestry in Novo Paraíso turned out to be a “manifest failure” (Chokkalingam et al., 2005: 410). The associates quit the agroforestry experiment on their lots after just one year and returned to devote themselves to ranching. Without a quick harvest, they did not see the immediate advantage of agroforestry. And, more importantly, they did not agree with the NGO’s proposal of community-based agroindustry for commercialization because collective engagement with the commercialization did not directly strengthen their ongoing individual ranching projects, which had already been framed through initial rural credit. The NGO insisted on the need for conscientização, or transformation of the settlers’ ecological rationality from one that values individual cattle ranching to the one that engages in communitybased natural resource management. This insistence actually worked to reveal that the ecological rationality of the settlers was strongly affected by the individual latitude within the community. Indeed, “the Protestant leader”, like Limirio, usually “gained a position of importance because of.[his].ability to lead adaptive strategies which promote individual benefits” for members of his group (Scott, 1979: 377, emphasis added). Limirio had attempted to establish a new discourse at this point, seeking after compatibility between the community-based agroforestry project and individual benefits. However, he ended up being torn between the associates and the NGO and, as a consequence, he was criticized in Novo Paraíso for the first time for not working sufficiently on behalf of the associates. At the beginning of 1996, the treasurer Kito left the association and stood as a town councilor candidate for the first general election in which Novo Paraíso participated as a submunicipal district of São Geraldo. He openly criticized Limirio for monopolizing decision-making regarding the NGO project. Limirio did not stand for the election this time, but an ally, Valdir, stood against Kito. When the result was declared, Valdir won and Kito lost. Thus Valdir became the first and only town councilor who could officially represent Novo Paraíso at the municipal government of São Geraldo. Although Valdir was not a crente, he was quite popular among the crente voters as he worked with Limirio to negotiate with INCRA to improve the condition of the main road, principally to attract bus line services. Then, Valdir started to publicly criticize the incumbent mayor, Lima, for doing nothing for their settlement. As a consequence, two political processes emerged in Novo Paraíso: one that represented the association, based on the alliance of Valdir and Limirio against the incumbent mayor; the other supporting the mayor Lima, headed by Kito. In fact, as Lima had sensed the betrayal of Limirio, he had appointed Kito to be his representative in Novo Paraíso for the 1996 election. In 1997, the 80,000-ha Bamerindus Ranch became ownerless, as the Bamerindus Bank filed for bankruptcy. Kito entered the ranch to occupy a new land and, together with 300 posseiros who settled at the ranch, created the Small Producers’ Association of Vale do Mucura (AVM) to demand from INCRA demarcation of an area within the ranch called Vale do Mucura. At the same time, Limirio started to promote a new project with the NGO entitled “Coordination of the Integrated Process for the Sustainable and Participatory Development of Grotão dos Caboclos” through the World Bankled Subprogram for Demonstrative Projects of the Amazon. The project installed a rice-processing plant and a banana flour factory and financed a 12-ton truck, a tractor and a pickup to help the associates to commercialize their farm products. With salaries paid to 14 factory workers and drivers, the small producers’ association in Novo Paraíso started to look like a specialized business firm. In 2000, another general election took place, and the antagonism between the two political processes became much more

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visible than in the previous election because of these two distinctive producers’ associations. Kito was again a candidate for town councilor, allied with Lima, and Valdir stood for re-election, backed by Limirio who now stood as vice-mayor with the opposition mayoral candidate, Manuel. Although religion was not an explicit element to characterize the distinction, the religious difference became visible as Manuel was a vigorous crente and, together with Limirio, they started to campaign as Brothers, targeting crente voters. These two political processes contested each other but also interacted and worked to shape an emancipation movement, claiming to split off Novo Paraíso from São Geraldo. It was Kito who first initiated this movement. 4.3. The emancipation movement Kito was originally from the north-eastern state of Bahia. When he was 15 in the 1960s, he went to Quito in Ecuador (where his nickname came from) on the federal government’s program to send miners. In the late 1970s, Kito went to Altamira in Pará through the newly opened Transamazon Highway with colonists and construction workers, hoping to get a better job than mining. In Altamira, he joined the syndicate movement and was invited to Xinguara where conflicts between posseiros and landowners were intensifying. He became the president of STR-Xinguara and worked actively with Lima to persuade the Pará state government to turn São Geraldo into a municipality. After Limirio entered São Geraldo, Kito invited Limirio to join the syndicate movement and explored the demarcation of Grotão. Kito had obtained a 100-ha lot just outside Novo Paraíso, but sold it a few years later because he became “too busy with activities in Bamerindus.”10 In 2000, Kito was trading cattle and (illegally) some lots in Bamerindus, while receiving more than five minimum salaries from Lima. Kito was said to own about 200 ha of forest in Bamerindus, which he had bought illegally from AVM associates. He was eager to differentiate himself from Limirio and establish leadership through the occupation in Bamerindus, as he explained: “[Limirio’s]. party is PSDB [Brazilian Social Democratic Party], the same as our current President. [of the Republic, Fernando Cardoso], and Manuel. [of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PTB)]. is right. Lima is left, and I support that. You know PDT (Workers’ Democratic Party)? The party for workers. We work for the poor and working people in our forest and rural zones. They work for capitalists in cities.” According to d’Avila (2006), the Church of Assembly of God started to officially appoint its political candidates through “the General Convention of the Assemblies of God in Brazil” implemented in 2001. Thus, at the occasion of this 2000 election, Brother Limirio as well as the mayoral candidate Manuel were independent candidates. But, naturally, they were politically distancing themselves from the leftist politics heavily influenced by the Catholic Church in Brazil, while mobilizing a large number of votes from crentes who were indeed becoming “capitalists.” On the other hand, Kito’s embracement of the leftist ideology failed to mobilize votes, principally because his position was ambiguous. First of all, he had been following crentes’ ways of accumulating capital in the settlement and then started criticizing their ideology behind the economic activities. At the same time, his criticism against crentes did not make him ally with the leftist

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social movements like the MST. For example, he often criticized the MST for not working on their land but “running after money” from INCRA; or for occupying an INCRA office for days in Marabá, disturbing his negotiations with INCRA to demarcate the occupied lots in Bamerindus. This ambiguity worked to isolate him from the major political-religious territories in this region, namely, business-oriented capitalist evangelicals and organized society and Catholic-oriented leftist social movements. Recognizing this, he strived to create his political territory by instigating an emancipation movement: “I have lived here in Novo Paraíso for 11 years. Now, I think Novo Paraíso should become a municipality. It is actually going through an official process at the Administrative Division of the state government. There are about 1000 families, approximately 4000 people already living in the village. In Bamerindus, we have more than 500 families. If we combine the entire Grotão and Vale do Mucura, for sure, we will have 10,000 to 12,000 people. It is just estimation, but I think we will have about that number of inhabitants in the municipality of Novo Paraíso. That’s already a good reason. Piçarra [the newest municipality in the region, which was split off from São Geraldo in 1997, about 30 km from Novo Paraíso] became a municipality with 8000 inhabitants. Manuel does not have an interest in this. [matter]. though we already put in a request with our signatures to the Legislative Assembly of Pará. If we become a municipality, there will be more jobs and budget and I mean our life will be absolutely better.” During the campaign, Limirio died in a car accident, but Manuel won and became the new mayor. Kito lost and Valdir was reelected. Then, Valdir followed up Kito’s emancipation request. For a re-elected politician like Valdir, pursuing the emancipation movement indicated the possibility of making himself the mayor of Novo Paraíso. However, after 1997, Pará state government stopped creating new municipalities because new municipalities became known to mismanage budget and also induce further deforestation (Homma, 2000). In the south-east of Pará, between 1984 and 1997, during which time 26 out of the region’s eventual 38 municipalities were created, 80 percent of primary forests belonging to these municipalities had been completely cleared (Watrin et al., 2001). The correlation between emancipation and forest clearing demonstrated that the posseiros’ ecological rationality of converting the forests into cities was socially accepted, and this acceptance seemed to be further consolidated as crentes such as Manuel (and possibly Limirio) and their allies became mayors and councilors. From 2000 until as recently as 2012, the town councilors (not only Valdir) from Novo Paraíso were elected with the emancipation agenda. Even if the new municipalities were no longer easily instituted, emancipation movement was not deterred because, as Kito mentioned, turning a settlement into a municipality meant building new administrative headquarters (thus more civil servant jobs) and direct budget transfer from the federal government, as well as own tax revenue. And, the settlers started taking this movement as the making of own civic place in which they could deliberate on how to engage in their own development and environment. From this deliberation, a new form of environmental governance emerged, which came to expose ongoing intervention problems. 4.4. Environmental governance

10 The following accounts by Kito are reconstructed based on an interview (20/7/ 2000, Novo Paraíso).

After the 2000 election, Valdir created the municipal secretariat of the environment as the first institutional form of environmental

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governance in São Geraldo. Instead of insisting on the communitybased agroforestry as proposed by the NGO project in Novo Paraíso, the secretariat aimed to assist each settler of the municipality with pasture improvement and agricultural production while incrementally encouraging to plant tree crops and explore marketing opportunities. This intention, however, was not supported by the NGO which decided to leave the region in 2005. On the face of it, the NGO seemed to be giving up on the settlers. But from the settlers’ point of view, it had failed to recognize their shaping of own environmental governance, led by the local government. In principle, the NGO project’s demand on productive conservation meant a radical change for the settlers, as it refused to recognize cattle culture and engage in the improvement of pasture. What Valdir showed with the creation of the municipal secretariat was not only his showing off of power but the fact that the NGO approach was considered to be counterproductive. If the support for pasture improvement were not widely available, settlers would push the deforestation frontiers to create new pasture. As Kito himself led the process, the massive invasion of Bamerindus was not only led by the newly arriving posseiros but also by the old settlers from Grotão who aimed to own more properties or newer pastures. Of course, the forest invasion-based frontier expansion was still possible in the study area because of a physical condition that could allow individual settlers to move and clear forests. However, more importantly, the settlers’ economic activities and social interactions were seemingly fortified by the Protestant rationality popularized on the agrarian frontier. After all, the posseiros did not shape an organized social movement but still followed Assembly of God for a reason: “evangelical Christianity’s message of enjoying earthly prosperity while seeking salvation is.more appealing when compared to the Catholic philosophy of sacrifice and piety for eternal glory in the afterlife” (Villarreal, 2012). Seeking after the earthly prosperity, posseiros strived to develop their businesses by converting the forests into capitalist production sites and cities with churches. Indeed, their engagement did not entail philosophy of sacrifice to maintain the organizational order but justified the pursuit of individual benefits that could be derived from different organizational possibilities. The emancipation movement has been in fact a convenient tool for the individual settlers to institutionalize their rationality without having to organize social movements, and the institutionalization demonstrated their social (including religious) background and status of political empowerment (cf. Bicalho and Hoefle, 2010). At this point, promoting environmental management in this local context pushes us to rethink “groundwork” to establish “an ecological order” (Princen, 2010: 10). For example, if no more forests should be cleared, there needs to be a way to allow the settlers to sustainably ranch their cattle on their assigned properties; and if agroforestry is desired, there needs to be an individual credit program and technical assistance specifically aimed at the fruit tree plantation and commercialization on each lot. None of these pragmatic options for the individual settlers to consider serious engagement with environmental management have been sufficiently available so far. The new institutions of environmental governance emerging from emancipation movements, such as the municipal secretariat of environment, are now indicating the importance of these options. Future interventions should recognize them and discuss their sustainability and feasibility with the involved individual and collective actors including settlers, local politicians, extension workers, producer associations, banks and churches. The implementations of desired environmental management and establishment of an ecological order will only become locally relevant and generate sense of civic engagement then.

5. Conclusions The main objective of this paper was to explore the relationship between ecological rationality and environmental governance by showing that: 1) distinction between state and society is not always a given condition, especially on the agrarian frontier where social interactions articulate emancipation movements and institutional arrangements of environmental governance; and 2) religion can underpin the rationality behind the social interactions and the institutional arrangements. The paper has paid a particular attention to the role of the Pentecostal Church of Assembly of God vis-àvis the Catholic Church in the southeast of the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. Surely, not all the settlers on the frontier were followers of the Pentecostal Church; but the Church had strong influence in shaping the settlers’ rationality, which could be observed as the social interactions leading to political processes at general elections and emancipation movements. The consequence of the Church’s popularity was continual conversion of forests into municipalities and promotion of capitalist accumulation at individual properties. Environmental governance in such a local context does not represent a well-planned regulatory framework but an outcome of deliberations by new settler-turned-citizens who reflect on information about their environmental management with reference to the ongoing individual projects. In the study area, the communitybased NGO project made the settlers reflect on their individual cattle ranching projects and elect evangelical candidates and their allies like Valdir. The election demonstrated that the settlers’ reflections led to advance the agenda of pragmatic approaches that aim to combine ranching (at individual levels) with tree plantations (that require collective commercialization arrangement). Instead of denouncing individualistic ranching, the intervening parties need to observe and evaluate locally proposed approaches and support them in such a way as to make the implementation both socially relevant and environmentally sustainable. This means that the necessary support cannot always assume well-organized associations or social movements constituted by citizens who would act “‘rationally’ in response to information made available to them” about sustainability of their environment (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998: 218). For example, non-participation in the NGO project does not necessarily make the settlers irrational. Rather, it simply shows different rationality that the NGO needs to seriously negotiate. In principle, even after the individual property rights are assigned and importance of natural resource management introduced, the settlers constantly and often tacitly make deliberations on “how to live well and live within their means: their financial means, their societal means and.their biophysical means”, as well as religious means (Princen, 2010: 17). These means let the individual settlers make priorities and trade-offs, directing the ways that institutions are arranged for sustainable rural development. The future research agenda should aim to more systematically find out the role played by religious means in organizing and justifying other means of living so that we come to grasp rationality behind each settler’s making of priorities. Methodologically speaking, looking into religion requires longitudinal observation of both individual life and institutional histories, as this paper has demonstrated through lives of political leaders, such as Limirio, and their involvement with the church, the producer association and the political party. Indeed, Limirio’s life has demonstrated that we need to holistically look into connections between religion, business and politics. By carefully describing the connections, we may come to empirically understand how people try to make sense of their lives and mobilize themselves without a priori existence of organizational norms on the frontier. Sustainable rural

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