ABSTRACT
As the most-visited non-urban national park in Brazil, the Iguaçu National Park stands as a prime example of the role of the nature state in controlling, managing and producing nature. The subsequent processes of settlement, claims-making and conflict reveal how a sporadic approach to national park policy gave way to a vision that paired state conservation with federal initiatives designed to resolve broader agrarian conflicts. This chapter focuses on how did hundreds of Brazilian farmers manage to settle inside a national park decades after its creation and why did the Brazilian state undertake such efforts to evict these settlers. It also focuses on what caused the departure from previous neglect to an engagement in environmental policy implementation in Iguaçu, and how can the case of Iguaçu, with its initial lack of federal control over public land and existing internal colonization policies, bring light to the conditions, institutional framework, and space of action of the Brazilian nature state.
