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

Abstract

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.

Addressing climate change through climate action

“…Climate action can also refer to the initiatives taken by civil society, with members calling on policymakers to adopt more ambitious climate policies. The concept of "active citizenship" has been studied since decades (Hoskins & Mascherini, 2009) and results in the formation of environmental movements not only in advanced market democracies, but also in transition countries such as Brazil (Hochstetler, 2021;Hochstetler & Ricardo Tranjan, 2016). The Fridays for Future movement with school strikes for climate awareness initiated by Swedish student Greta Thunberg represents a novel form of protest, since they have been able to mass-mobilize young people to place pressure on politicians (Boulianne et al, 2020;Fisher & Nasrin, 2021).…”

Varieties of climate governance: the emergence and functioning of climate institutions

“…Brazil's story is one driven by domestic shifts in forest politics, which then created political space for accommodation of international pressures. This shift allowed Brazil to re-frame climate change from a technical issue allocated to the Department of Science and Technology to one embedded in an environmental framing, and accompanied by a climate law and strategy (Hochstetler, 2021).…”

“…In India, it spurred creation of a business constituency for carbon action, which helped shift the politics of climate action (Pillai & Dubash, 2021). By contrast, in Brazil the CDM was placed in the hands of the Ministry of Science and Technology as part of a larger narrative that climate change is a scientific, rather than an environmental issue, as a defense against surrendering the country's forests to international control (Hochstetler, 2021).…”

“…Thin notions of state capacity -staffing and resources -can affect the ability of states to proactively steer climate outcomes. Low capacity emerges as a reason for reactive climate policy-making in India (Pillai & Dubash, 2021), while by contrast in Brazil, the deliberate creation of capacity around forest issues enabled effective implementation of an ambitious forest protection program (Hochstetler, 2021). Mildenberger (2021) notes that high levels of competence and capacity have been built within the US bureaucracy through various periods of institutional layering.…”

“…In countries with entrenched sectoral histories, a climate framing has failed to displace polarised sectoral politics, but latent climate institutions have occasionally had effect. Hochstetler (2021) argues that Brazilian climate politics was subsumed within complicated national forest politics. Similarly, in South Africa, the electricity sector played a shadow climate institutional role, from within which, ultimately, renewable energy incentives emerged through an electricity-specific 'integrated resource plan' that created a platform to challenge the fossil fuel dependent incumbent.…”