Social equity as a marker of sustainability transitions: Exploring radical innovations in the Brazilian Amazon

Sustainability transitions scholarship has long been developed with particular attention to energy systems, but in much of the world the land-use sector is the more problematic one. Agricultural production from tropical countries – often directed at international markets – accrues as much as 20% of global emissions. There is growing recognition of the importance of forests for the climate as well as for biodiversity and livelihoods, yet tropical deforestation is on the rise, driven chiefly by a handful of commodities such as soy, palm oil, and beef. Change may be a sustainability imperative, but strong land-use and agri-food systems that span across borders are experiencing momentum. They are constituted of relatively stable configurations of policies, markets, infrastructure, social practices, and cultural meanings that have co-evolved. These elements form socio-technical regimes that experience path dependency and resist change, including political resistance by incumbent actors who may favor minor incremental changes but not significant shifts. As such, inequality – of power, of access to resources, or to decision-making, etc. – is a key aspect of transitions. A sustainability transition can be understood as disruptive change that leads to a new configuration of more sustainable practices, and it only happens when niche innovations (which exist in the fringes of a dominant regime) eventually break through and gain scale. Knowing which innovations can lead to such significant changes is a core research question. This study takes social equity as a lens to address that question and advance research on the nexus between inequality and sustainability transitions. It explores agriculture-driven deforestation as a key governance arena and the Brazilian Amazon as an iconic case study. The Amazon arguably is the world’s most emblematic terrestrial biome, and one with an imminent tipping-point that could turn the rainforest into a much drier and poorer ecosystem, with considerable local and global impacts. Through a combination of literature review and key-informant interviews with stakeholders in Brazil, this study identifies and assesses the most salient initiatives currently in place to change Amazonian land-use patterns. As an analytical framework, in addition to transitions theory it uses the key concept of inclusiveness. It assesses the social, ecological, and relational inclusiveness implied in the changes those innovations foresee, i.e., how they affect the distribution of socioeconomic benefits and burdens, access to natural resources and ecological processes, and governance mechanisms. Preliminary results suggest that inclusiveness (as a proxy for social equity) is a powerful marker of innovations that are sufficiently radical to create what we could call a transition. Inequality therefore emerges not as an afterthought or ex post assessment but as a constitutive indicator of the quality of the change sought, helping tell apart actual sustainability transition efforts from mere incremental change. The study concludes that inclusiveness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving sustainability transitions, however. It discusses avenues for further research on the role of inequality in thinking of transitions as well as what other features may be needed to produce transformative change.