Barriers to Local-level Ecosystem Assessment and Participatory Management in Brazil

procedures that can integrate local knowledge with data collected at the regional or global level and produce information that is salient, credible, and politically legitimate to the decision makers that are a major audience for the results of the MA” (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2004). This chapter aims to contribute to such effort by capturing lessons from participatory local-level ecosystem assessment and resource management in Brazil. Participatory approaches in natural resource management have the potential to bridge knowledge systems (e.g., local ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge), enable knowledge flow across scales, empower local people, speed up technological adaptation, enhance human capital, and increase adherence to resource management goals (Chambers 1991; McAllister 1999). Since the Rio 92 Conference, the discourse of participatory management has been incorporated into several government policy agendas, particularly in high-biodiverse developing countries with a history of centralized (top-down) natural resource management. In Brazil during the military regime (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s), environmental conservation policies were based on a command-and-control approach, with no attention paid to local knowledge and needs, leading more often than not to ecosystem degradation (Fearnside 1979, 1987; Moran 1983; Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Becker 2001)—the pathological resources management (Gunderson, Holling, and Light 1995). Since 1990, when the first Chapter 14