No abstract

Recent years have witnessed an expansion in international investment in large‐scale infrastructure projects with the goal of achieving global economic integration. We focus on one such project, the Inter‐Oceanic Highway in the “MAP” region, a trinational frontier where Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru meet in the southwestern Amazon. We adopt a resilience approach as an integrative framework to understand various types of road‐paving impacts. We focus on migration activity as an indicator of retention of collective memory, a concept associated with resilience. We pursue a comparative analysis of the three sides of the MAP frontier as well as subregions within each side. Since road paving may be mediated by other factors, we distinguish among the effects of multiple explanatory factors. Data come from a multinational survey of rural communities. The findings show considerable net migration and turnover, both indicative of eroding collective memory and a lack of demographic resilience to externally induced change in the MAP frontier. The findings indicate variation across the frontier, which road paving helps explain, along with some of the mediating factors. These findings contribute to the literature on the impacts of new infrastructure and integration as well as the study of social‐ecological resilience.

Infrastructure is a worldwide policy priority for national development via regional integration into the global economy. However, economic, ecological and social research draws contrasting conclusions about the consequences of infrastructure. We present a synthetic approach to the study of infrastructure, focusing on a multidimensional treatment of indicators of connectivity and resilience. As our study case, we adopt a trinational frontier in the southwestern Amazon being integrated by a highway, and use survey data for rural leaders to evaluate the relationship of community connectivity to market towns and social-ecological resilience. The findings show varying relationships among different dimensions of connectivity and resilience, which bear implications regarding indicator approaches to the study of infrastructure impacts.