The discourse of a sociobioeconomy has been promoted in Brazil as a novel development paradigm for supporting Amazonian forest communities while keeping the forest standing. During the era of Chico Mendes and the Kayapó-led resistance of the late 1980s, the defense of living in and from the forest constituted a rejection of developmentalist models. But today, bioeconomy promoters frame the region’s development in terms of natural resources that will be integrated into scalable and technology empowered markets with links to finance. Meanwhile, an alternative sociobioeconomy discourse argues for community autonomy and alternative processes of development. Yet there has been little study of the governance of trade systems linked to outsider actors, or of the claim that initiatives can “scale up” per a technological model of transition. In this research, we explore how stakeholders from a variety of sectors conceive of institutional arrangements surrounding access to markets and local development in a sociobioeconomy. The analysis reveals how community autonomy can be supported under some conditions, while in others there are risks of external control over trade systems, and the territorial expansion of green colonial projects.
keywords: Sociobioeconomy; Community Governance; Amazonia; Political Ontology; Market–Community Tensions
abstract for AHE 2026
We create wealth with forest identity marketing
Robert Davenport 
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