Explaining the emergence of land-use frontiers.

Land-use expansion is linked to major sustainability concerns including climate change, food security and biodiversity loss. This expansion is largely concentrated in so-called 'frontiers', defined here as places experiencing marked transformations owing to rapid resource exploitation. Understanding the mechanisms shaping these frontiers is crucial for sustainability. Previous work focused mainly on explaining how active frontiers advance, in particular, into tropical forests. Comparatively, our understanding of how frontiers emerge in territories considered marginal in terms of agricultural productivity and global market integration remains weak. We synthesize conceptual tools explaining resource and land-use frontiers, including theories of land rent and agglomeration economies, of frontiers as successive waves, spaces of territorialization, friction and opportunities, anticipation and expectation. We then propose a new theory of frontier emergence, which identifies exogenous pushes, legacies of past waves and actors' anticipations as key mechanisms by which frontiers emerge. Processes of differential rent creation and capture and the built-up of agglomeration economies then constitute key mechanisms sustaining active frontiers. Finally, we discuss five implications for the governance of frontiers for sustainability. Our theory focuses on agriculture and deforestation frontiers in the tropics but can be inspirational for other frontier processes including for extractive resources, such as minerals.

Land-use policies and corporate investments in agriculture in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano.

Growing demand for agricultural commodities is causing the expansion of agricultural frontiers onto native vegetation worldwide. Agribusiness companies linking these frontiers to distant spaces of consumption through global commodity chains increasingly make zero-deforestation pledges. However, production and land conversion are often carried out by less-visible local and regional actors that are mobile and responsive to new agricultural expansion opportunities and legal constraints on land use. With more stringent deforestation regulations in some countries, we ask whether their movements are determined partly by differences in land-use policies, resulting in "deforestation havens." We analyze the determinants of investment decisions by agricultural companies in the Gran Chaco and Chiquitano, a region that has become the new deforestation "hot spot" in South America. We test whether companies seek out less-regulated forest areas for new agricultural investments. Based on interviews with 82 companies totaling 2.5 Mha of properties, we show that, in addition to proximity to current investments and the availability of cheap forestland, lower deforestation regulations attract investments by companies that tend to clear more forest, mostly cattle ranching operations, and that lower enforcement attracts all companies. Avoiding deforestation leakage requires harmonizing deforestation regulations across regions and commodities and promoting sustainable intensification in cattle ranching.