The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center's video: Households Populations and Complex Socio-Environmental Systems

In this lecture on households, populations, and complex socio-environmental systems, Dr. Eduardo Brondizio uses the example of the Brazilian Amazon to describe the increasing complexity and connectivity of the modern globalized world. He first overviews a range of theoretical perspectives that focus on different scales of change, and notes that analytical frameworks are distinct from theories and can incorporate multiple levels of analysis. He highlights the role of comparative, longitudinal, and cross-sectional analysis to work over time and space. He then describes household change and agricultural modernization in Brazil, as well as forest farms in the Amazon and the ways that global popularity of acai fruit changes management decisions at the local scale. He highlights as well increasing urbanization and the nature of collective action decision-making as communities migrate and consolidate. He ends with the notion of islands of landscape governance to describe indigenous forest reserves, and emerging regional complexity and connectivity of these landscapes. He summarizes these new research areas as still situated in old discourses but also requiring new analytical frameworks. This video is a recording of a presentation given as part of SESYNC’s Socio-Environmental Immersion program.