Endogenous capabilities, technological trajectories, and corporate plans: limits to development strategies for the Amazon

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the Sustainable Amazon Plan and the Ecological-Economic Macrozoning of the Legal Amazon, development strategies that prioritize the interaction between innovation and territorial institutional arrangements. The application of spatial analysis techniques made explicit gaps between subnational spatial patterns of interaction between agents, capacities and sources of innovation supported by industrialist rationality, highlighting limits in the strategic pretension of promoting, in Amazonian territories, institutional arrangements that support more qualified forms of use of natural resources. It is demonstrated here the disregard of extra-regional connections that influence the determination of the endogenous innovation potential of the territories; in addition, technological trajectories, and patterns of reproduction of relevant agents were not properly assessed in the construction of strategies. These inconsistencies greatly weaken the dimensioning, scope, extension, and reorientations of institutional arrangements necessary to incorporate science, technology, and innovation into productive dynamics capable of shaping a new development model in the Brazilian Amazon.

KEYWORDS:
Amazon; Development and innovation; Regional development; Geography of innovation