Large-scale access and energy infrastructure projects, together with expanding investments in natural resource extraction, pose significant challenges to biodiversity conservation, forest cover, and the defence of forest peoples\u27 rights and livelihoods across the wider Amazon region. Following a period in which safeguards and forest dwellers\u27 territorial rights were strengthened under more permissive political opportunity structures, the current period has been characterized by efforts to weaken these protections and to facilitate large-scale private investment in previously protected lands. We describe these investment-based threats to forests and rights, and the nature of regulatory rollbacks in the region. We then discuss some of the ways in which social movement actors have responded to these pressures and the extent to which they have affected the policies driving these pressures on forests and rights. While in prior decades movements were able to exercise mediated influence on policy, at present the channels open to them are mostly indirect, though opportunities for collaboration between movements organizations and rights-defending government agencies do emerge periodically offering channels for mediated influence
