Work-in-progress
Pathways of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest
*Invited to revise and resubmit
*Awarded the ASA Sociology of Development Section Graduate Student Paper Award in 2024
* Co-winner of the ASA Political Sociology Section Graduate Student Paper Award in 2024
As cases of successful decarbonization are rare, we know little about how states build the capacity to reduce CO2 emissions. This article conceptualizes climate change as a domain of state-building, with globalizing and scientizing dimensions, and follows how state capacity and elites’ resistance interact overtime. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival work, and administrative data, I provide a comparative-historical analysis of Brazil’s pathway to decarbonization from 1985 to 2022, suggesting four policy regimes. In what I call Sheltered Experimentation; environmental bureaucrats leverage transnational and scientific ties to protect themselves from politics and increase state capacity. The state then implements policy expansively, and draws attention of elites, through Infrastructural Clarification. This process leads to Institutional Stalemates: the equilibrium in which policies could potentially reduce emissions, but elites disallow vast transformation. Political shocks can tip stalemates into State Dismantling, when the environmental state itself is at danger. I conclude by discussing varied pathways to state performance and my contributions to political-historical and environmental sociologies, as well as green transition debates.
Financialization as Transnational Policy Insulation: Climate Finance in Brazil, 1990-2020
Billions of dollars are poised to finance the global green transition—how will these funds reach the Global South, and with what effects? In this article, I show how funders,lawyers and bureaucrats create financial intermediaries leveraging at least four socio-legal strategies that can potentially safeguard policy: (1) capitalization or who can finance an intermediary; (2) governance or what are the decision-making processes embedded in an intermediary; (3) procurement or which legal entity holds the funds; and (4) domestication or how is the intermediary connected to policy. To illustrate the utility of my framework, I adopt a sequential mixed methods design using the case of climate finance in Brazil. First, I build a transnational climate finance dataset containing over 3600 grant-level payments to state and non-state actors in Brazil from 1990 to 2020. I show the centrality of climate funds as financial intermediaries. In step two, with interview and archival data, I show how and why lawyers, bureaucrats, and donors designed these intermediaries with specific capitalization, governance, procurement, and domestication strategies to safeguard climate policy. I conclude by discussing the effects of said strategies and calling attention towards how these strategies can safeguard policies in times of democratic backsliding.
National Backlash and the Defunding of the Liberal World Order: Evidence from International Geneva, 2000-2023”
* data collection methodology and descriptive findings are available here.
Participation in heterogeneous institutions at the international level explains the diffusion of liberal and illiberal norms. But how can nation-states weaken the world-society? The United Nations system is often approached as a crucial site for global liberal script development, but its maintenance usually goes underappreciated by sociologists. In this article, we introduce a new dataset to answer questions related to UN financing. We compiled and harmonized hundreds of financial reports by international organizations headquartered in Geneva, amounting to over 30’000 payments since 2000 by state and non-state actors. Using regression models, we show that after multiple controls, the liberal world society is mainly financed by Western governments with a small percentage of private American foundations. Defunding of the world society, in turn, follows from democratic backsliding. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for how sociology conceptualizes the global liberal space and its relationship to the domestic level.
How Race Matters for Views of Redistribution: The Case of South Africa [Chana Teeger, Livio Silva-Muller & Graziella Moraes]
*Invited to revise and resubmit
Elites are increasingly visible in academic and political discourse owing to their disproportionate power in shaping policy. For the most part, however, elites have been viewed in race-blind terms. In this paper, we advanced a racialized perspective on elite studies by highlighting three salient ways that race matters for elite views on inequality and redistribution. First, we focus on elites as racialized actors whose racial identities impact their perspectives on social policies. Second, we examine the effect of holding a historicized perspective of racialized inequality on elites’ redistributive preferences. Third, we highlight the importance of attending to the racialization of social policies, distinguishing between redistributive measures framed in race-blind and race-conscious terms. We demonstrate the utility of a racialized approach to elite studies by analyzing survey data collected from political and economic elites in South Africa. Findings show that elites’ racialized identities matter for their redistributive preferences, but this is mediated by their historical understandings of racialized inequality and conditioned on whether they are evaluating race-conscious or race-blind policies.
Whose Merit and which Redistribution? Deservingness and Varieties of Redistributive Preferences in Brazil, South Africa, and beyond [Graziella Moraes Silva & Livio Silva-Muller]
A growing body of literature put forward discourses of meritocracy as key to the ways people think about poverty, inequality, and privilege. On the one hand, the contrast between hard-working and deserving citizens and idle and undeserving poor has often been mobilized to justify the retrenchment of the welfare state in the past decades. On the other hand, celebrating elite merit, and therefore their deservingness, also plays an important role in the support, or lack thereof, for redistributive measures. Nevertheless, little is known about (1) how discourses about elite and poor merit relate to each other, and (2) how these discourses relate to preferences for different types of redistribution. In this chapter, we call for more varied measures of both belief in merit and support for redistribution in elite research. In a global context of increasing inequality and polarization, elites may attribute their success to hard work while recognizing poverty as a consequence of structural conditions (or vice-versa). This, in turn, can be linked to varying support for different redistributive policies such as in-kind direct assistance (shelter, food), income-based (cash-transfer, universal basic income, pension), and taxation-related (profit tax, wealth tax, capital gain tax). We illustrate these relationships using survey data collected in Brazil and South Africa.