Amazon Cooperation Treaty: Members, Environment and Regional Sovereignty

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty (ACT) is the 1978 agreement that brought together the eight South American states with Amazonian territories around a precise diplomatic formula: cooperation over the Amazon without turning the region into a space administered by outside actors. Signed in Brasília, the treaty sought to connect regional development with the rational use of natural resources. It also brought environmental protection into the same frame as the sovereignty of Amazonian countries.

By putting those governments inside the same legal instrument, the ACT gave them three concrete diplomatic capacities. It let them defend national jurisdiction over Amazonian territory in a shared regional language. It also gave them a vocabulary for treating development and the environment as connected issues rather than rival agendas. Later, that legal base made it possible to create the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), headquartered in Brasília. The organization gave permanent form to agendas that the 1978 diplomacy had only sketched.

Summary

• The ACT was signed on July 3, 1978, by eight Amazonian countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
• The treaty affirms state sovereignty over Amazonian territories, while using that sovereignty as the basis for cooperation on development, transport, science, health, natural resources, and the environment.
• ACTO emerged from the decision to institutionalize the treaty: the countries decided to create the organization in 1995, approved the amendment protocol in 1998, and installed the Permanent Secretariat in Brasília in 2003.
• The Belém Declaration, adopted at the 2023 Amazon Summit, turned environmental concern into institutional mandates: it reinforced ACTO as a coordination forum, reactivated commissions, created technical networks, strengthened the Amazon Regional Observatory, and moved the fight against deforestation into a more operational regional agenda.
• The system runs into a simple political rule: ACTO coordinates and organizes cooperation, but it does not execute national policy on its own; to work, it needs government mandates, financing, and state capacity inside each territory.

Origins and members of the ACT

The Amazon Cooperation Treaty was signed in Brasília on July 3, 1978. Its members are the eight independent states with territories connected to the Amazon Basin or the Amazon biome. That list defines the agreement as regional, state-based, and South American:

• Bolivia
• Brazil
• Colombia
• Ecuador
• Guyana
• Peru
• Suriname
• Venezuela

French Guiana, although geographically Amazonian, is not part of the treaty because it is an overseas department of France rather than an independent South American state.

That membership shows the treaty’s first political choice. The ACT was not designed as a global environmental convention or as an international administration for the forest. It was created as an agreement among Amazonian states that claimed territorial authority over parts of the region. Coordination was supposed to happen among those governments, without handing the agenda to outside powers or nonregional actors.

Article II limits the treaty’s scope to the parties’ territories located in the Amazon Basin or closely connected to it by geographic, ecological, or economic characteristics. This formula avoids two common misunderstandings. First, the ACT does not make the entire national territory of each member a subject of Amazonian cooperation. In addition, the reference to the basin and related areas allows the treaty to cover cross-border problems that do not stop at customs posts. Rivers and transport belong to that physical logic because water routes and infrastructure link territories before governments coordinate policy. Public-health cooperation and scientific work follow the same pattern. So do border populations and natural-resource use, because each government can act inside its jurisdiction while the practical result depends on what neighboring states do with the same basin.

Why Brazil promoted the treaty

Brazil’s initiative has to be read within the foreign policy of President Ernesto Geisel’s government. In the 1970s, Brazil sought to widen its autonomy and diversify partnerships. The treaty also helped reduce regional suspicion about Brazilian economic and territorial expansion. The Amazon was especially sensitive because the region had low population density, extensive borders, physical integration projects and growing international attention to the environment.

After the 1972 Stockholm Conference, environmental protection became more visible in multilateral diplomacy. For Amazonian governments, that change had an ambiguous meaning. Environmental cooperation could bring resources, scientific knowledge and legitimacy. At the same time, it fed fears of external interference over the forest and water resources, as well as over biodiversity and Indigenous lands. The ACT answered that dilemma by stating that environmental cooperation should pass through the states of the region, not through international tutelage over the Amazon.

Brazil’s calculation had a regional dimension as well. Brasília sought closer relations with Amazonian neighbors that often distrusted Brazilian integration projects. At the same time, Brazil was in tension with Argentina over Itaipu and the Plata Basin. By creating an Amazonian cooperation front, the Brazilian government broadened its South American ties and showed that its regional policy was not limited to the Plata axis.

This origin explains why the treaty places environmental cooperation inside a framework of sovereignty. The ACT did not arise as a simple response to deforestation. It emerged from an attempt to organize the presence of Amazonian states in a region that was becoming more visible to the world, more integrated into national economies, and more exposed to disputes over development.

Legal and political principles

The ACT rests on three ideas that structure its logic. The first is the sovereignty of Amazonian states over their territories and natural resources. This affirmation is not decorative: it defines who decides, who negotiates, and who is politically responsible for public policy in the region. When the countries reaffirm sovereignty, they are saying that the forest will not be governed as an internationalized space.

The second idea is the harmonious development of the Amazon. In the vocabulary of the 1970s, that expression began with economic integration and transport and communications infrastructure. The treaty then gave the formula practical content through scientific and technological research, rational use of natural resources, and navigation and communications. It also opened cooperation in health measures, tourism, and policies affecting Indigenous and border populations. In contemporary reading, the same formula looks like an antecedent to sustainable development since it joins economic growth, social inclusion, and ecological protection before that diplomatic vocabulary became established.

The third idea is equality among the signatories. In practice, that equality appears in consensus-based decision-making and in a diplomatic posture that avoids turning Brazil’s larger territorial presence into formal command over the others. Brazil has the largest share of the Amazon, but the ACT does not give it a legal right to direct the agenda alone. Amazonian cooperation depends on agreements among states that are unequal in size and capacity but formally equal within the treaty.

These principles explain the institution’s limited reach. The ACT does not create a supranational authority able to order domestic environmental policy. It creates cooperation obligations and political channels for harmonizing action. The treaty can bring governments closer and help finance projects. It can produce technical instruments as well, but it does not replace the national institutions that implement, enforce, and judge public policy.

From flexible cooperation to ACTO

In its first years, the ACT operated more as a diplomatic framework than as a robust international organization. The presidential meetings in Manaus in 1989 and 1992 showed that function. In 1989, Amazonian countries reacted to international pressure and reaffirmed their sovereignty in the Amazon Declaration. Before the Rio Earth Summit, the 1992 meeting brought development and environmental protection together under the idea of quality of life.

Institutionalization advanced in the 1990s. In 1995, the countries decided to create an organization to strengthen treaty implementation. In 1998, they approved the Protocol of Amendment to the ACT, which gave the organization international legal personality. In 2003, ACTO’s Permanent Secretariat was installed in Brasília. With legal personality, a permanent secretariat, and its own headquarters, the organization gave administrative continuity to an agenda that had previously depended more on dispersed diplomatic meetings.

To understand what ACTO does, it helps to separate its political and technical bodies. The Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs sets political guidelines and mandates. The Amazon Cooperation Council follows the implementation of those decisions, while the Coordination Commission brings together technical representatives from the countries. The Permanent Secretariat then organizes programs, networks, and projects. Permanent national commissions connect that regional agenda to each state’s ministries and domestic agencies.

ACTO, therefore, did not make the Amazonian system supranational. Its main function is to coordinate, support, and technically implement decisions made by member states. In environmental policy, this appears in forest-cover monitoring and water-resource management. In the social field, it appears in Indigenous protection and health cooperation. In security, it appears in responses to wildfires and cross-border illicit activity. The organization turns political consensus into technical work, but progress depends on national governments providing mandates, data, personnel, and resources.

That architecture has both an advantage and a weakness. The advantage is that ACTO speaks from the region rather than from outside it, which helps Amazonian countries defend common positions in global environmental negotiations. The weakness is that any impasse among governments can reduce its operational capacity. Since decisions depend on consensus and voluntary cooperation, national political crises or bilateral disputes can delay appointments, projects, or commitments.

Environment, sovereignty, and sustainable development

The ACT is often described as an environmental treaty, but that description is accurate only if the environment is understood within a broader development agenda. The treaty does not separate the forest, the economy, and local populations. It starts from the idea that Amazonian states need to integrate their Amazon regions into national economies, improve living standards, and preserve natural resources that cross borders.

This design helps explain the diplomatic use of sovereignty. For Amazonian countries, sovereignty includes domestic political authority and external negotiating capacity. In practice, that means setting public policy, negotiating financing, controlling borders, and policing illegal activities. It also means taking part in global rule-making without accepting that other governments define the forest’s value unilaterally. Regional sovereignty, in this setting, is both a defense against external tutelage and an obligation to govern the Amazon more effectively.

The tension appears when environmental protection requires measurable targets, enforcement, and domestic costs. One government may accept regional declarations on preservation but resist common deforestation targets if it considers them a constraint on agricultural, energy, or land policy. Another may defend international financing but reject conditionalities that seem to interfere with national laws. ACTO exists in precisely that space: it tries to convert shared concerns into cooperation without erasing national differences.

The Amazon Summit and the Belém Declaration

The 2023 Amazon Summit in Belém marked an attempt to update the ACT for a more demanding environmental agenda. The Belém Declaration reaffirmed state sovereignty while recognizing that deforestation, wildfires, biodiversity loss, water pollution, illegal mining, and social inequality cannot be handled only through isolated national policies.

The declaration assigned ACTO the job of organizing that coordination among the eight Amazonian countries. That choice had concrete institutional effects: it pushed forward the Amazon Network of Water Authorities, opened space for cooperation among forest authorities, reactivated special commissions, and put an Amazonian financial mechanism on the table. On the social agenda, the Belém Declaration treated Indigenous peoples and traditional communities as participants in governance, not only as policy beneficiaries. On the economic and technical agenda, it connected science, innovation, and bioeconomy to the creation of productive alternatives. On the state-capacity agenda, it linked health, public security, and action against cross-border illicit activities to effective forest protection.

The outcome also showed the political limit of cooperation. The countries recognized the urgency of fighting deforestation and avoiding the forest’s point of no return, and the declaration spoke of common goals by 2030 and the ideal of reaching zero deforestation in the region. Yet the agreement rested on national targets, such as Brazil’s 2030 commitment, rather than a single binding regional deadline. The summit worked in a different register: it turned minimum consensus into networks, forums, and cooperation instruments without forcing every government to accept the same domestic policy calendar.

ACTO’s recent agenda

After Belém, ACTO began presenting a more operational agenda. The organization identifies the 2023 Belém Declaration and the 2025 Bogotá Declaration as political mandates that expanded its regional role. In practical terms, those mandates push ACTO toward working instruments: special commissions to guide ministries, authority networks to exchange data and protocols, regional programs to finance common tasks, the Amazon Regional Observatory as a platform for comparable information, and projects that connect technical agencies, communities, and international partners.

In the environmental field, networks on water, forests, and integrated fire management aim to facilitate comparable data, protocols, and technical assistance. The Amazon Forest Program, the Amazon Alliance against Deforestation, and the Amazonian Financial Mechanism move ACTO from declarations toward project pipelines: they connect forest policy, money, and technical agencies. In security, the Special Commission on Public Security and Cross-Border and Transnational Illicit Activities in the Amazon Region seeks to address environmental crimes, illegal mining, timber trafficking, smuggling, and money laundering. These agendas show that protecting the forest depends on environmental rules and concrete state capacity: policing, intelligence, justice, territorial presence, financing, and economic alternatives for communities under pressure from illegal markets.

The Indigenous agenda has also gained visibility. The Amazonian Mechanism for Indigenous Peoples was conceived as a permanent space for dialogue between governments and Indigenous peoples of the region. That mechanism changes the political position of those groups: Indigenous peoples and traditional communities no longer appear only as beneficiaries of environmental policies. In many areas, their lands and knowledge become part of the capacity to protect biodiversity and govern territory.

Limits and function of the ACT

The ACT has clear limits. It does not stop deforestation by itself, resolve national land conflicts, replace climate finance, or create a regional environmental police force with its own command. Its members also have different political regimes, administrative capacities, and economic strategies. Oil-producing countries, countries under strong agricultural pressure, countries affected by illegal mining, and countries with lower fiscal capacity do not arrive at the table with the same domestic costs.

Even with those limits, the treaty provides a regional basis for negotiating costs that no member can manage alone. Without the ACT and ACTO, the Amazon would tend to appear in global forums as an environmental problem fragmented among eight national policies. With them, Amazonian countries can build common positions, organize technical projects, seek financing, and respond to external pressure in their own language.

In short, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty turns sovereignty into the starting point for cooperation, not into a justification for isolation. Its effectiveness depends less on a single decisive clause than on the ability of Amazonian governments to use ACTO to coordinate policies, recognize local social interests, and accept that forest protection requires verifiable national decisions. That combination of sovereignty, development, and environmental obligation has been the political core of the ACT since 1978.