Grassroots Mobilization in Brazil’s Urban Amazon : Global Investments, Persistent Floods, and Local Resistance across Political and Legal Arenas

By the 1980s, the Brazilian Amazon was an urbanized forest. A large portion of its population was living in non-rural areas attracted by better service provisioning and potential economic opportunities in fast-developing urban centers. Located at the Amazon Estuary-Delta, Belém is the Amazon’s largest metropolitan area, marked by informal urban expansion, and serving as an illustrative case of the opportunities and challenges with which urban populations deal in the region. Faced with significant pressures of absent infrastructure, high rates of poverty, precarious settlements, and even more frequent flood events, already in the 1980s, Belém was home to the biggest urban reform project of its time in Latin America: The Macro-Drainage Project of the Una River Watershed. Costing over 300 million USD, the project was intended to have a multilevel system of governance through which the Inter-American Development Bank and local government could coordinate project activities. Yet, due to the combination of poor infrastructure and changing rainfall patterns, about half a million people remain vulnerable to flood hazards and property damages to date. Our analysis uses a socio-legal approach to studying grassroots mobilization against the violation of social and environmental rights aggravated by floods. We also draw on Ostrom’s concepts of action arena and action situation to examine collective action across political and legal arenas within which individuals, grassroots organizations, and the state negotiate/contest flood-related issues. Conducting archival and ethnographic research, we find a story of conflict and cooperation between the civil society and political and legal actors, which accounts for a mix of optimism and skepticism regarding the improvement in the livelihood of the urban poor affected by this developmental program. This interdisciplinary lens contributes to understanding the limits and potentials of collective action to promote development as Belém prepares an emergency public policy plan for the Una River Watershed