The Fortune of the Commons: Participatory Evaluation of Small-Scale Fisheries in the Brazilian Amazon.

This paper applies a participatory approach in evaluating small-scale fisheries, focusing on the Arapaima gigas fishery in the Brazilian Amazon. The evaluation uses the social-ecological system (SES) framework, adopted to explain the conditions needed for sustainability and user cooperation in natural resources management, as a more suitable alternative to the 'blueprint' or 'panaceas' approaches, based only on property rights or governmental intervention. However, managers and users often do not have the necessary information compiled and available for a specific SES while some actions need to be taken immediately.

The DURAMAZ indicator system: a cross-disciplinary comparative tool for assessing ecological and social changes in the Amazon.

During the last 20 years, the Amazon region has been at the same time a place of massive ecological and social change and a laboratory of experiments aimed at promoting sustainable development. Policies and project initiatives involving diverse social groups and environmental contexts have been implemented across the region. They have resulted in mixed outcomes and trade-offs between social and environmental dimensions, making their impact at the local level difficult to assess and their successes difficult to generalize.