Corporate power in the bioeconomy transition: The policies and politics of conservative ecological modernization in Brazil

The bioeconomy transition is a double-edged sword that may either address fossil fuel dependence sustainably or aggravate human pressures on the environment, depending on how it is pursued. Using the emblematic case of Brazil, this article analyzes how corporate agribusiness dominance limits the bioeconomy agenda, shapes innovation pathways, and ultimately threatens the sustainability of this transition. Drawing from scholarship on power in agri-food governance and sustainability transitions, an analytical framework is then applied to the Brazilian case. The analysis of current policies, recent institutional changes and the case-specific literature reveals that, despite a strategic framing of the bioeconomy transition as a panacea for job creation, biodiversity conservation and local development (particularly for the Amazon region), in practice major soy, sugarcane and meatpacking conglomerates dominate Brazil’s bioeconomy agenda. In what can be described as conservative ecological modernization, there is some reflexivity regarding environmental issues but also an effort to maintain (unequal) social and political structures. Significant agribusiness dominance does not bode well for smallholder farmers, food diversity or natural ecosystems, as major drivers of deforestation and land-use change (e.g., soy plantations, cattle ranching) gain renewed economic and political stimulus as well as greater societal legitimacy under the bioeconomy umbrella

Tweeting News Articles Readership and News Sections in Europe and the Americas

In this article we investigate the impact of social media readership to the editorial profile of newspapers. We analyze tweets containing links to news articles from eight of the largest national newspapers in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Germany. The data collection follows the first two weeks of October 2012 and includes 2,842,699 tweets with links to news articles. Twitter-shortened links were resolved using a three-pass routine and assigned to 1 of the 21 newspaper sections. We found the concentration of links to news articles posted by top users to be lower than reported in the literature and the strategy of relaying headlines on Twitter via automatic news aggregators (feeds) to be inefficient. The results of this investigation show which sections of a newspaper are the most and least read by readers in different parts of the world, with German readers placing greater emphasis on Politics and Economy; Brazilians on Sports and Arts; Spaniards on Local and National news; Britons and Americans on Opinion and World news. We also found that German and Spanish readers are more likely to read multiple national newspapers, while British readers more often resort to foreign sources of news. The results confirm that feedback to news items from a large user base is pivotal for the replication of content and that newspapers and news items can be clustered according to the editorial profile and principles of newsworthiness inherited from legacy media. The results of this investigation shed light onto the networked architecture of journalism that increasingly depends on readership agency

Non-commutative Quantum Mechanics in Three Dimensions and Rotational Symmetry

We generalize the formulation of non-commutative quantum mechanics to three dimensional non-commutative space. Particular attention is paid to the identification of the quantum Hilbert space in which the physical states of the system are to be represented, the construction of the representation of the rotation group on this space, the deformation of the Leibnitz rule accompanying this representation and the implied necessity of deforming the co-product to restore the rotation symmetry automorphism. This also implies the breaking of rotational invariance on the level of the Schroedinger action and equation as well as the Hamiltonian, even for rotational invariant potentials. For rotational invariant potentials the symmetry breaking results purely from the deformation in the sense that the commutator of the Hamiltonian and angular momentum is proportional to the deformation.Comment: 21 page

Neglect paves the way for dispossession: The politics of “last frontiers” in Brazil and Myanmar

A convergence of factors creates a worrisome contemporary pattern of resource dispossession of local populations in developing countries. Growing market demand for commodities, states’ interest in expanding their fiscally fertile territories, and environmental conservation pressures have promoted resource frontiers, where locals all too frequently lose access to land, water and livelihoods. To add momentum and legitimize outsiders’ agendas, such locations are sometimes framed as “last frontiers” – the final places of possibility. While various forms of resource “grabbing” have gained increased attention, we argue that a crucial dimension of frontier dynamics – neglect and its role in facilitating dispossession – warrants further study as it tends to be overlooked. Drawing on the frontiers and political ecology literature, this article analyzes how neglect by state authorities, markets, and environmental organizations paves the way for dispossession in those landscapes. We compare two cases: the Matopiba soy frontier in the savannas of Brazil\u27s Cerrado and the Chin Hills of western Myanmar. Our results show how neglect is critical to imaginatively frame regions as “empty” places of possibility, excluding local actors economically from development and politically from governance initiatives. We argue that neglect not only precedes but is an enduring feature of resource frontiers, and identify four consecutive phases: (I) pre-frontier abandonment, (II) selective support to outsiders, (III) overlooked harms to communities, and (IV) socially exclusive sustainability agendas. As environmental concerns gain increasing global salience, Phase I sometimes leaps to Phase IV as international actors pounce to control what they regard as “last frontiers” for conservation. We conclude that external actors’ inaction enables local communities’ dispossession as much as their actions. This raises critical policy and scholarly questions about actors\u27 responsibility and accountability, not only for harms done but also for systematically failing to heed local actors’ aspirations and needs

Commodity-Centric Landscape Governance as a Double-Edged Sword: The Case of Soy and the Cerrado Working Group in Brazil

Persistent ecological and socio-economic impacts from the expansion of industrial monocultures in the tropics have raised land use sustainability to the top of the environmental policy agenda. As major crops such as soy continue to experience growing market demand and threaten both natural ecosystems and traditional populations, a number of multi-stakeholder governance initiatives have been established around agricultural commodity chains or key landscapes. Effectiveness in curbing unsustainable land use, however, remains limited. In this context, innovative initiatives have blurred the lines to combine both supply chain and landscape governance. We analyze such arrangements-here conceptualized as commodity-centric landscape governance (CCLG)-with an in-depth case study of the Cerrado Working Group, a multi-stakeholder initiative led by civil society and the soy agribusiness to address land use change in that savanna landscape in Brazil. The paper examines how that initiative has come about, its agenda, as well as usually underexposed political dimensions using agenda-setting theory. The research is based on extensive fieldwork in Brazil, with data collected through document analysis and 56 key-informant interviews. The findings suggest that a sustainable development agenda for the Cerrado has been substantially narrowed to become mostly one of conversion-free soy supply, serving more the interests of that agroindustry and its consumers than those of the landscape\u27s most vulnerable stakeholders, such as local communities. While the Cerrado Working Group has importantly broadened the policy scope beyond commodity certification, its limited inclusiveness and a skewed agenda have led to instruments that target only soy farmers as beneficiaries. We conclude that, although effective for targeting conversion drivers, CCLG can crystallize and reinforce existing land use patterns by granting disproportionate power to dominant stakeholders, thus limiting the agenda to incremental changes. As a consequence, distant demand-side actors may exert greater governance authority than the landscape\u27s own population. If embodying norms of inclusiveness and equitable participation, CCLG may serve as an entry point, but it does not per se replace inclusive land-use planning and integrated landscape governance

Understanding deforestation lock-in: Insights from Land Reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon

Cropland and pasture expansion continues to erase natural ecosystems at a staggering speed globally, notably in the tropics. Conventional policy approaches, usually focused on a particular land-use change driver (e.g., specific commodities) or individual regulations (e.g., the Amazon Soy Moratorium), have consistently failed to achieve sufficient or sustained results. The swift reversal of Brazil’s earlier success in reducing Amazon deforestation – now again accelerated – offers perhaps the most sobering illustration of that. Therefore, this article draws from scholarship on sustainability transitions to propose a more comprehensive systems view of unsustainable land-use patterns. We examine persistent tropical deforestation as a case of “lock-in,” using a transitions lens, and explore its constitutive elements. As a case study, we analyze the situation of Land Reform settlements in the Brazilian Amazon, where as much as one-third of that biome’s deforestation takes place. While subject to some specific factors, those places are also enmeshed in a broader setting that is common across the Brazilian Amazon’s deforestation frontier (e.g., infrastructure conditions, market demands, and sociocultural norms). Drawing from document analysis of Brazilian policies and fieldwork in three Land Reform settlements in Pará State, we expose multiple forms of techno-economic, institutional, and socio-cognitive lock-in that together drive deforestation systemically in those settlements. These drivers form a strongly consolidated socio-technical regime around large-scale agriculture that includes material and immaterial factors (e.g., cultural ones), a regime that not only resists change but also – like a vortex – pulls others into it. Escaping deforestation lock-in may thus require outside forces to help local actors destabilize and eventually replace this unsustainable land-use regime. International zero-deforestation efforts offer a starting point, but a transition requires moving beyond piecemeal, incremental change or end-of-pipe approaches and toward concerted, strategic action that addresses multiple of those regime elements in a coordinated way to replace it as a system. We argue that understanding deforestation lock-in is vital for tackling its worrisome persistence and that sustainability transitions theory offers an illuminating, but still underutilized, framework to analyze and eventually overcome unsustainable land use