1. Environmental Conditionality, Sovereignty, and the Making of Brazilian Development.
- Author
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Heck, Charles
- Subjects
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SOVEREIGNTY , *DICTATORSHIP , *FOREIGN loans , *ECONOMIC development , *ENVIRONMENTALISM , *SOCIAL interaction ,BRAZILIAN foreign relations - Abstract
In the final years of the Brazilian dictatorship, the Sarney administration adopted a nationalist position towards the protection of the Amazon. This position was taken in response to the perceived threat of a US directed intervention to protect biodiversity and limit CO2 production attributed to deforestation within Brazil's border. This nationalist position strongly asserted the sovereign right to exploit the natural resources within Brazil's borders in order to expand its economy and improve its relative position in the international sphere. By the end of the Sarney administration, decision makers had adopted a more 'internationalist' approach to dealing with environmental issues in order to preempt 'environmental conditionality' by US influenced international lending institutions. By the early 1990s, Brazil had become a leading advocate for an international regime on the environment. This paper argues that the international diplomatic community and Brazilian decision makers mutually constituted an identity shift that integrated Brazil into global norms and institutions through a combination of transnational activism, coercion, and social interaction. In contrast with orthodox theoretical explanations that posit causal powers to deep structures of the international system, this paper traces the processes that form the causal mechanisms behind an identity shift in an empirical case study. These causal processes are inherently reductionist, as change in the international system is produced by the embodied actions of the representatives of different institutions. It uses Foucault's theorization of governmentality to explain how environmental conditionality was used to introduce environmentalism into Brazil's foreign policy, and Checkel's theorization of social interaction to explain how environmental regulation was introduced into Brazilian governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011