Demographic Dynamics, Livelihoods and Land Use: a Twenty Five Years Longitudinal Study for the Brazilian Amazon

We examine how land use and livelihoods over time in the Brazilian Amazon is explained by households´ demographic composition and sources of income and welfare, and stages of frontier development. We build on the "household and land use life cycle" and the "household livelihoods" theories to relate land use and land cover change to the many components of colonists´ decision-making, individual aspirations of income and welfare and collective needs of familiar group(s) in rural settings, and how they are mediated by the context in which these decisions are made. We use a unique panel of plots and households based on field surveys carried out in the municipality of Machadinho in 1985 (288 farm households), 1986 (552 farm households), 1987 (808 farm households), 1995 (1,079 farm households), and 2010 (a sample of 259 farm households). In order to understand livelihoods dynamics we estimate cross-section and panel latent class models (Grade of Membership), this last to estimate conditional transitional probabilities from one livelihoods to others over time. We finally discuss how changing livelihood options are impacted and have consequences depending on the scale of analysis and their challenges for public policies regarding sustainable livelihoods, development and land use in the Amazon.