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
Sociological studies show that economic growth or global norms diffusion lead to domestic environmental institutions, but how do states build the capacity to implement climate mitigation as a bureaucratic function? Drawing on administrative data, in-depth interviews, and archival work, I explain the variation in CO₂ outcomes in Brazil from 1985 to 2022. Building on fictitious commodities, I center environmental problems as a distinct domain of state-building and follow how these transform state capacity and economic elites’ resistance. In what I call sheltered experimentation, environmental bureaucrats leverage transnational and scientific ties to protect themselves from politics and increase climate capacity. The state then implements policy effectively, drawing the attention of economic elites (i.e., infrastructural clarification) and leading to climate stalemates: the equilibrium in which policies could potentially reduce emissions, but elites disallow vast transformation. I discuss when to expect variation in pathways to effectiveness and stalemates by arguing we find ourselves in a heated world-system where the economy is not the sole structural source of power. I conclude with my contributions to varied fields of sociology.
Climate Finance as Transnational Policy Insulation: Evidence from 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 center financial intermediaries as key actors channeling climate finance. I propose a framework composed of four interrelated questions that highlight how socio-legal strategies bestow policy insulation potential upon financial intermediaries: (1) capitalization or who can finance a fund; (2) governance or what are the decision-making processes embedded in the fund; (3) procurement or which legal entity holds the fund; and (4) domestication or how are funds 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, with automated and manual scrapping, I build a climate finance dataset containing over 3600 grant-level payments to state and non-state actors in Brazil from 1990 to 2020. With multi-level network analysis, I trace the emergence of national climate funds as financial intermediaries. Second, with interview and archival data, I compare the socio-legal strategies of the identified funds and highlight why lawyers, bureaucrats, and donors coded them in specific ways. Finally, I leverage Bolsonaro's attempt to dismantle climate finance to estimate the effects of socio-legal strategies on climate finance endurance. I compare a counterfactual network treated by Bolsonaro’s executive order with the existing network and show how socio-legal strategies account for the endurance of at least 41.6% of policy funds. I conclude by calling for closer attention to the socio-legal strategies that can potentially insulate billions of dollars in the green transition.
How Race Matters for Elites’ Views of Redistribution: The Case of South Africa [Chana Teeger, Livio Silva-Muller & Graziella Moraes]
Elites are increasingly visible in academic and political discourse owing to their disproportionate power in shaping policy responses to inequality. For the most part, however, elites have been viewed in race-blind terms. In this paper, we advance 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 having a historicized perspective of racial inequality on elites’ redistributive preferences. Third, we highlight the importance of attending to the racialization of social policies, distinguishing between race-neutral and race-conscious redistribution measures. We demonstrate the utility of a racialized approach to elite studies by analyzing survey data collected from political and economic elites in South Africa.
Who Pays for the World Society? 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. The United Nations system is often approached as a crucial site for global liberal script development, but its maintenance usually goes underappreciated by sociologists. Which countries and actors finance the existence of this alleged global liberal space? 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. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for how sociology conceptualizes the global liberal space.
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.
