Environmental versus Developmental State in the Amazon Rainforest
Decoupling CO2 emissions from economic growth remains one of the main challenges of the green transition, and Brazil allegedly managed to do it. One of the most successful cases of state-driven decarbonization occurred in Brazil from 2004 to 2012, when the country implemented policies that curbed deforestation in the Amazon by over 80%. On the growth side, and concurrently, a similar "success" story emerges on the Amazon frontier: a series of policies made Brazil the largest global producer and exporter of beef and soy. How?
My book provides a detailed comparative-historical account of environmental and developmental state-building in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest since 1985 through the particular lens of emissions-growth decoupling. I build on over 8 years of research, which includes extensive archival work, in-depth interviews with economic, policy, and scientific elites, diverse administrative and environmental data analyses, and recurring field visits to the Amazon Rainforest.
While very recent studies of decarbonization have centered on a novel developmental state geared toward reducing emissions through growth — e.g. green industrial policy — attempts to decarbonize or grow have a longer history that normally involves a completely different set of actors and constraints. By jointly analyzing these longer state-building processes, I argue, we can see how distinct bureaucratic cultures, trajectories, and (transnational) ties can form within-state institutions that are in contradiction with each other. These different bureaucratic ecosystems, ultimately, help us understand why more recent attempts to decouple are hard.
Part I centers on the "younger" Environmental State in the Amazon and reveals that underpinning the decarbonization success lies a transnational network of Brazilian ecologists, bureaucrats, and movements who together re-conceptualized the Amazon Rainforest as a climate problem, rendered it global, and outpaced economic elites in implementing stringent policy.
Part II centers on the "older" Developmental State in the Amazon and shows that the growth story is also underpinned by a transnational network of Brazilian agronomists, bureaucrats, and firms who developed a system of subsidies and economic relations that drove crop yields and international demand to unprecedented levels. The issue is that these are completely different networks. At the particular temporal juncture when the Environmental State expanded into the territory of the Developmental State, contradictions became impossible to ignore.
Part III centers on old and new attempts that jointly consider growth and decarbonization — such as the creation of environmental funds in national development banks, the development of sustainable agricultural practices in Amazonian state-scientific institutions, and more recent national development plans proposing "bioeconomies". It shows how distinct bureaucratic cultures and rationales clashed, complicating attempts at decoupling.