The Dynamics of Sustainability Paradoxes: A study of non-timber forest products businesses in the Amazon Forest

Businesses embedded in high-value biodiversity areas face tensions between social, cultural, economic, and political pressures and environmental issues. On the one hand, exploitation of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) offers benefits to people’s livelihood, including income generation, and allows harvest processes that preserve forestry. On the other hand, the commercialisation of NTFP presents potential conflicts due to an imbalanced supply and demand ratio, the risk of monocultural practices and negative ecological implications. This context unfolds several sustainability paradoxes, where contradictory yet interrelated elements exist simultaneously and persist over time. This study aims to identify the sustainability paradoxes in NTFP in the Pan-Amazon system. The research analyses cases in five Amazonian countries, i.e., Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, to shed light on the complexities of managing sociobiodiversity products. We employ a systemic approach to understand the dynamics of the forest’s business. The content analysis of interviews and documents followed by causal mappings of systems dynamics supports identifying the feedback loops and paradoxes cycles. While previous studies on paradoxes implicitly describe the balancing loops, our research explicitly uses a conceptual representation to explain their role in producing counterintuitive behaviours. The results show reinforcing loops of vicious cycles, such as slash-and-burn practices to implement monocultures and cattle production, and virtuous cycles, such as activities to enhance NTFP production by preserving and supporting forest regeneration. Although interventions as establishing protected areas create a balancing loop, it also produces a counterintuitive behaviour where low productivity prevents the sustainable use of the forest. We contribute to qualitative methods in sustainability studies by introducing the application of causal mapping in this particular field. The systems analysis proved to be a valuable technique for describing the underlying paradoxes of sustainability. The main theoretical contribution is an alternative explanation of organisational paradoxes’ persistence process and counterintuitive dynamics. As a practical contribution, the systemic and comparative view of sustainability challenges in different Amazonian countries provides insights to organisations and policymakers on finding shared solutions.