Local social organization to support sociobiodiversity value chains (e.g., agroforestry, forest, meliponiculture, and fisheries management) in the Brazilian Amazon has been historically based on community associations and farmers’ cooperatives. These organizations have been important building blocks in the partnerships with private business, funding agencies, non-profit organizations, and governmental sector. However, they have been limited to address multiple challenges faced by local producers, and the young generation increasingly hesitate to join these organizations. In the last decades, a range of new social arrangements or social innovations have emerged in the region to overcome these limitations as a result of a commoning process. Based on a database of 200 place-based initiatives and six cases of sociobioeconomy production systems, we present an analysis of how new forms of social organization, which have been developed by local communities and organizations throughout the Amazon. These include formal and informal collectives and networks (e.g., ‘Rede de Sementes do Xingu’, ‘Coletivo do Pirarucu’) addressing contextual challenges, such as asymmetric and unfavorable commercial relations, lack of logistical infrastructure, political invisibility, pressures from illegal economies, among others. Although community association and cooperatives remain important building blocks of local organizations, new organizational models in partnership with local, regional, national, and international actors and organizations have allowed them to address supra-community constraints and opportunities, such as better access to markets, developing processing industries for value aggregation, and pursuing policy changes (e.g., minimum price policies) at the state level. In the process, local organizations are finding new pathways to reconcile social, environmental, and political demands without depending on historical legacies of clientelism that are often reproduced in many community associations and cooperatives. We examine the emerging polycentric organizational arrangement as creative and strategic responses from local organizations to address shared and place-specific problems. These emerging arrangements reflect the contemporary complexity of the Amazon and the historical pursuits of small-scale and indigenous producers for being heard, seen, and valued as major actors shaping the regional economy and biodiversity conservation.
