Radical Reorganization of Environmental Policy: Contemporaneous Evidence from Brazil

• Author: Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari,Ana Karine Pereira,Nathaly M. Rivera,Suely Mara Vaz Guimaráes de Araújo
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221148714
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221148714

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 248, Vol. 50 No. 1, January 2023, 115–132

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221148714

© 2023 Latin American Perspectives

115

Radical Reorganization of Environmental Policy

Contemporaneous Evidence from Brazil

by

Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari, Ana Karine Pereira, Nathaly M. Rivera,

and Suely Mara Vaz Guimaráes de Araújo

An overview of environmental policy in Brazil since President Jair Bolsonaro took

office in January 2019 suggests that the rise to power of a new political elite has led to a

radical change in Brazil’s trajectory of climate change initiatives and environmental pro-

tection. The new elite is associated with the disruption of two factors historically relevant

for the design of environmental policy: the participation of civil society in the governance

of public policy and multilateralism in matters of environment policy.

Uma análise das políticas ambientais brasileiras desde a tomada de posse de Jair

Bolsonaro da presidência da República em Janeiro 2019 constata que o aparecimento de

uma nova elite política acarretou em uma alteração radical na trajetória do Brasil com

respeito às suas iniciativas sobre a mudança climática e a preservação ambiental. Houve

uma perturbação de dois fatores por causa desta elite política que eram historicamente

importantes pela elaboração de políticas ambientais: a participação de organizações de

sociedade civil na governança de políticas públicas e o multilateralismo.

Keywords: Civil society, Multilateralism, Environmental policy, Radical change,

Brazilian politics

An unquestionable and inherent conflict characterizes the design of environ-

mental policy around the world (Dryzek, 1992; Shahar, 2019). The interaction

at various temporal and spatial scales, the myriad of actors involved, and the

general lack of internalization by some productive sectors of the negative exter-

nalities for the environment (Dryzek, 2013; Duit, Feindt, and Meadowcroft,

2016) increase the strains in the process of regulating the use and protection of

environmental resources. In developing countries this conflict is exacerbated

by their efforts to increase industrialization and urbanization and by the land

degradation that is common in agricultural countries (Hochstetler, 2019). This

is the case with Brazil, the largest democracy in Latin America, whose environ-

mental agenda is of worldwide importance. Constant improvements of its

environmental institutions have made Brazil known for having one of the best-

developed environmental policy structures in the world (Moura, 2016). In

January 2019, however, a new political elite was elected, and this led to a radical

Mauro Guilherme Maidana Capelari and Ana Karine Pereira are assistant professors at the Centro

de Desenvolvimento Sustentável of the Universidade de Brasília. Nathaly M. Rivera is a postdoc-

toral research fellow at the Universidade de São Paulo, and Suely Mara Vaz Guimarães de Araújo

is a full professor at the Instituto Brasileiro de Ensino, Desenvolvimento e Pesquisa.

1148714LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X221148714Latin American PerspectivesCapelari et al./RADICAL REORGANIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

research-article2022

116 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

reorganization of the country’s environmental institutions (Meeus, 2019) and a

potential reduction of the quality of its public policies (Araújo, 2020). While

recent works address the relationship between radical governments and the

environment in developed countries (e.g., Bomberg, 2017; Lachapelle and Kiss,

2018; Lockwood, 2018; Huber, 2020), we still lack a good understanding of this

relationship in developing countries. By characterizing the recent reorganiza-

tion of Brazil’s environmental institutions, we fill a gap in the study of the

relationship between radical politics and environmental policy in developing-

country settings.

Environmental policy conflicts in Brazil have historically been complex

(Drummond and Barros-Platiau, 2006), mainly because of the existence of var-

ious groups trying to insert their beliefs and views on the environment into the

country’s environmental agenda (Capelari et al., 2020). Drawing from the insti-

tutional literature (Mahoney and Thelen, 2009; Thelen, 2002), we suggest that

Brazil’s environmental policy was shaped over time through conflicts around

the distribution of resources that allowed some of these political coalitions to

regulate access to and the transformation of natural resources according to

their immediate interests (Guimarães, 1991). During the past few years, how-

ever, more systematic and thorough environmental concerns have prevailed

(Dean,1997; Rochedo et al., 2018), and improvements in the environmental

agenda have been sustained by the balance among the several political coali-

tions involved in struggles over power and over the resources made available

by the environmental policy subsystem (Issberner and Léna, 2016). In this

paper, we argue that this balance was historically supported by two sometimes

overlapping factors that have been disrupted with the rise of the new political

elite: (1) a close relationship between civil society and the state with regard to

environmental policies implemented in institutional and noninstitutional set-

tings that produced significant results in the quality of the state’s bureaucracy

and public policies (Jacobs, 2002; Pádua, 2018) and (2) environmental multilat-

eralism materialized through international pressures and cooperation that

turned into specific regulatory conditions in exchange for funding, the encour-

agement of stricter environmental rules or the enforcement of existing ones,

and the country’s willingness to be part of global environmental initiatives and

agreements (Margulis and Unterstell, 2016). The disruption of this balance may

have irreparable consequences for the environment. The remainder of this

paper is organized as follows: the next section identifies recent changes in leg-

islation and organization of environmental policy in Brazil since 2019, and the

following section characterizes these changes. A fourth section concludes.

The ReoRganizaTion of enviRonmenTal Policy

One of the most notorious changes in Brazil’s environmental policy is the

Environmental Licensing Bill 3.279/2004 (Brasil, 2004), proposed in 2004 but

put into discussion again in 2019 in the wake of the disastrous failure of the B1

tailing dam at the Córrego do Feijão mine in Brumadinho (state of Minas

Gerais), considered one of the biggest dam-related environmental catastrophes

in the past 25 years (BBC, 2019c). The precarious condition of this dam and