Resilience Perception of a Mining Town in Eastern Amazonia: A Case Study of Canaã Dos Carajás, Brazil

Abstract

The ability of communities to react to risks and disturbances is for their balance, development, and sustainability. The concept of resilience provides a way to think about policies and actions for future changes in socioeconomic and ecological-environmental systems. This paper analyzes, in the context of mining, the perception of the resilience of Canaã dos Carajás population in Pará State, Brazilian Amazon. The methodology involved face-to-face interviews based on a structured questionnaire conducted on a sample of 140 residents stratified from 11 social actors in the Canaã community. This approach allowed the evaluation of resilience perception using 26 interview statements derived from six resilience theories. Our multivariate analysis found that the level of residents’ perception of resilience was reasonable (with an average score of 3.04 ± 0.22 using a Likert scale, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.788). The interviewees pointed out one positive and five negative factors that influenced the level of resilience in Canaã. According to residents’ perceptions, the resilience of Canaã dos Carajás was moderate but could have been improved with more economic diversification, more infrastructure, and less inequality in access to services and participation in decision-making. The considered most relevant themes were problems caused by mining in the municipality, quality of life issues, difficulties dealing with change after the arrival of mining, and economic problems. This study contributes to the literature because it used theories as a conceptual orientation for the development of a resilience scale to measure resilience at the community level in the context of large-scale mining.