Governance and metagovernance systems for the Amazon

In this article, we examine the existing governance of the Amazon and the potential for more robust collaborative governance involving the countries of the Amazon region and other stakeholders. Our focus is the metagovernance of the (multilevel and fragmented) national governance systems that have proven incapable of controlling the environmental and social harms affecting the region. We focus our transnational analysis on the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (ACT) and the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) and our intranational analysis on Brazil (which has sovereignty over the greatest part of the Amazon). We explore the governance challenges, and point to possible ways to address them.