Land-use zoning on tropical frontiers :   emerging lessons from the Brazilian Amazon

Mahar, Dennis J.; Ducrot, Cecile E.H.

Land-use zoning on tropical frontiers : emerging lessons from the Brazilian Amazon

Mahar, Dennis J. | Ducrot, Cecile E.H.

For more than 30 years, successive Brazilian governments have engaged in programs aimed at opening up the Amazon region for settlement and development. Since the 1980s, the Brazilian government and some donors and nongovernmental organizations proposed prescriptive land-use zoning (LZ) to bring order and rationality to land use in the Amazon region. Land areas are first categorized in terms of their best uses from the standpoint of sustainable development through aerial and satellites maps, soil samples, biodiversity inventories, and other technical information. Using this technical information, some public authority then specifies the land uses that are permitted in given areas. LZ was first put into place on a large scale in Rondonia with assistance from the World Bank. Rondonia with the neighboring state of Mato Grosso is the site of one of the largest experiments in tropical frontier LZ in the world. A decade has now passed since LZ was legally instituted by the state of Rondonia through Decree Law 3782 of June 14, 1988. This note seeks to draw some interim lessons for the experience to date.

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