Climate institutions in Brazil: three decades of building and dismantling climate capacity

What kinds of national climate institutions can solve the governance challenges that the Paris Agreement devolves to them? This article identifies three stages of climate institutions in Brazil, a major emitter of greenhouse gases through deforestation that managed to reduce such emissions for nearly a decade. It shows that a narrow definition of climate institutions that seeks purpose-built state institutions fails to capture important dynamics there, and that such institutions have little direct impact on outcomes. In Brazil’s political landscape, national presidents exercise a decisive influence on their climate ambitions and capacities. However, positive and negative feedback loops also brought some effective climate action from the layering of climate purposes into existing institutions, as well as through non-traditional institutions like private governance arrangements for agriculture

Institutionalising decarbonisation in South Africa: navigating climate mitigation and socio-economic transformation

Strong climate institutional governance is necessary for countries to meet their international climate mitigation commitments. This article shows that while South Africa steadily created climate institutions up to 2011, these failed to take hold in the following years. Also, despite the systemically critical energy sector dominating the emissions profile, these climate institutions had no purchase over it. This situation is largely due to South Africa’s political economy of energy, which gave powerful actors the sustained ability to block meaningful institutionalisation of decarbonisation in the energy sector. As a result, South Africa’s climate institutions play few of the roles expected for successful institutionalization of climate action, with energy institutions instead playing a shadow climate governance role. This case suggests that conceptions of climate institutional governance in countries where single sectors dominate in emissions and power must accommodate the roles of institutions affecting climate outcomes despite this not being their primary objective

Repensando el presidencialismo: desafíos y caídas presidenciales en el Cono Sur

[ES] Desde 1978, el 40% de los presidentes electos en Sudamérica han sido desafiados por actores civiles que intentaron forzarlos a dejar sus cargos antes de tiempo. A través del juicio políticoy de renuncias, 23% han caído y han sido reemplazados por civiles. Los presidentes desafiados fueron más proclives a seguir políticas neoliberales, a estar personalmente implicados en escándalos y a carecer de mayoría parlamentaria en relación a sus colegas no desafiados. Entre los presidentes desafiados, la presencia o ausencia de grandes protestas callejeras demandando que fueran removidos de sus cargos es un factor crucial en la determinación de sus destinos. Estos desarrollos cuestionan diversos supuestos centrales acerca de los regímenes presidencialistas: que los mandatos presidenciales son firmemente fijos y que la consecuencia del conflicto político en el presidencialismo es el quiebre democrático.[EN] Since 1978, forty percent of elected presidents in South America have been challenged by civilian actors trying to force them to leave office early. Through impeachment and resignations, twenty three percent have fallen and been replaced by civilians. I find that challenged presidents were more likely to pursue neoliberal policies, be personally implicated in scandal, and lack a congressional majority than their unchallenged counterparts. Among challenged presidents, the presence or absence of large street protests demanding they be removed from office is then crucial in determining their fates. These developments confound several core assumptions about presidential regimes: that presidential terms are firmly fixed, that populations cannot withdraw as well as grant presidential mandates, and that the consequences of political conflict in presidentialism are democratic breakdown

Tracking presidents and policies: environmental politics from Lula to Dilma

Does the Brazilian presidential system shape environmental policy there? The comparative literature on environmental policy offers few reasons to think that it might. Most explanations of variations in the quantity and quality of environmental regulation stress levels of economic development or move outside of the nation- state to examine international processes of diffusion and convergence. Other studies look at large macrostructural differences like the contrast between democratic and authoritarian systems and/or the role of non-state actors. This article examines environmental policies and outcomes in three successive presidential administrations in Brazil to develop hypotheses about whether institutional factors should gain a larger place in comparative studies of environmental policies and outcomes

Assessing the Third Transition in Latin American Democratization: Representational Regimes and Civil Society in Argentina and Brazil

Recent political and economic transitions in Latin America have shaped a third transition in the nature of civil society and democratic representation. The conceptual territory of democratic representational regimes can be mapped out in four theoretical patterns of state-society relations: adversarial, delegative, deliberative, and cooptive. A comparison of representational regimes in state-society relations in Argentina and Brazil shows a shift in civil society towards organization in nongovernmental organizations, in addition to social movements. Despite this common characteristic, the different emerging representational regimes in these two countries carry different implications for the quality of democracy

Environmental impact assessment: evidence-based policymaking in Brazil

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures aim to prospectively collect evidence about the environmental impacts of economic projects and to avoid or compensate for those costs. This article asks whether such procedures have been effective in Latin America after many regional countries returned to some version of the developmental state after 2000. It does so by surveying the procedural effectiveness of Latin American regulations comparatively before turning to a deeper study of the Brazilian case. In Brazil, which has some of the strongest EIA procedures in the region, it finds that stakeholders make very different assessments of EIA effectiveness, not least because they define the standard differently. Economic actors in and out of the state criticize Brazilian EIA as ineffective from a transactive standpoint, which questions the time and cost associated with environmental licensing. Environmental and community activists see EIA as ineffective in achieving the substantive sustainability ends they value. Neither appreciates the procedural improvements licensing professionals have offered. The article concludes that EIA invites a broader set of stakeholders than did classic developmental states, but cannot on its own adjudicate among the resulting multiple visions of how to carry out development strategies

South-South relations and global environmental governance : Brazilian international development cooperation

South-South relations have become increasingly relevant for understanding global environmental governance in the 21st century. This article explores the socio-environmental contributions and impacts of Brazilian South-South cooperation for international development. Case studies of its international technical cooperation and the international project finance of BNDES show a mixed picture, with environmental benefits countered by environmental harms

Transnational activist networks and rising powers: transparency and environmental concerns in the Brazilian National Development Bank

This article studies how transnational advocacy networks can influence international development finance. Transnational activists shaped the World Bank's lending by increasing its transparency and limiting its socioenvironmental impacts. Developing countries can now look toward rising powers’ national development banks to finance their infrastructure and energy projects. The national development banks’ weak transparency and socioenvironmental standards pose a new challenge for transnational activism. Can activists leverage strategies used in World Bank reform to influence emerging power national development banks? We argue that whether a target is a supranational or national institution shapes the deployment and effectiveness of the strategies activists can use for influence. A supranational mandate and structure facilitates the deployment and effectiveness of a direct strategy focused on the transnational level, targeting the bank itself, and an indirect strategy focused on the national contexts of the bank's shareholders and borrowers. In contrast, a national mandate and structure encourages activists to deploy influence strategies solely in the context of the lending state. They furthermore make indirect strategies more effective than direct ones. We illustrate our argument by exploiting variation in the success across campaigns of a transnational network created to reform the Brazilian National Development Bank

Sovereign Limits and Regional Opportunities for Global Civil Society in Latin America

In this article, we evaluate whether Latin American participation in international arenas reinforces traditional divides between state and society in global politics or transforms state-society relations in ways compatible with the concept of global civil society. We examine the participation and interaction of Latin American nongovernmental organizations and states at three recent United Nations conferences: the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. We conclude that Latin Americans are full participants in any emerging global civil society. Their experiences at the 1990s issue conferences closely track those of NGOs of the Northern Hemisphere, notwithstanding the much more recent appearance of NGOs in Latin America. At the same time, Latin Americans bring a regional sensibility to their participation in global processes that reflects recent political developments and debates in the region