National policies encounter municipal realities: A critical analysis of the outcomes of the List of Priority Municipalities in curbing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

At the peak of Amazonian deforestation in the mid-2000s, a suite of initiatives to curb deforestation was implemented, narrowing their scopes to particular agents, critical municipalities, and economic activities and supply chains. The List of Priority Municipalities (LPM) launched in 2008 became a central tenet of these efforts. It requires local agents in listed municipalities to individually and collectively reduce deforestation and implement a comprehensive farm-geocoding registry across the municipality. We combine region-wide spatial–temporal land-cover analysis and census data with in-depth fieldwork to examine the LPM policy at regional and municipal levels, discussing the policy's limitations in inducing effective responses across diverse municipalities. At the regional level, our study presents a new historical-geographic categorization and map of 530 Amazonian municipalities. We propose four regional clusters of municipalities according to patterns of deforestation, agricultural activities, demographic and agrarian structures, emancipation history, and socioenvironmental protection. We draw on this analysis to contextualize the trajectories of the 62 listed municipalities within the region’s moving deforestation frontier and discuss why many of the achievements observed locally have not been replicated regionally. At the municipal level, we investigate four case studies in-depth to unveil the factors underlying the LPM policy mixed outcomes. We discuss how local agents’ responses to the LPM policy are context-specific, reflecting their perception of trade-offs between the economic impacts of sanctions, incentives to collaborate, and potential benefits arising from environmental compliance. We detail and discuss how dynamic macro-political and institutional settings altering law enforcement mechanisms and market incentives interact with subnational environmental governance, either facilitating or inhibiting individual and collective actions locally. Finally, we discuss the role of inter-institutional collaboration and coordination among command-and-control policies, market-oriented initiatives, and incentives for local collective actions in triggering incentives for land-use and governance innovations against deforestation, both locally and regionally.