Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America: potential utility of a resilience approach for building archetypes of land-systems change

Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience isincreasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization,upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-termdata. We revisit the approach of system archetypes for identifying resilience surrogates and apply it to land-use systems using sevencase studies spread across Latin America. The approach relies on expert knowledge and literature-based characterizations of keyprocesses and patterns of land-use change synthesized in a data template. These narrative accounts are then used to guide developmentof causal networks, from which potential surrogates for resilience are identified. This initial test of the method shows that deforestation,international trade, technological improvements, and conservation initiatives are key drivers of land-use change, and that ruralmigration, leasing and land pricing, conflicts in property rights, and international spillovers are common causal pathways that underlieland-use transitions. Our study demonstrates how archetypes can help to differentiate what is generic from context dependant. Theyhelp identify common causal pathways and leverage points across cases to further elucidate how policies work and where, as well aswhat policy lessons might transfer across heterogeneous settings.