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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures aim prospectively to collect evidence about the environmental impacts of economic projects and to avoid or compensate for the costs incurred. 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 its effectiveness, not least because they define the standard differently. Economic actors in and out of the state criticise Brazilian EIA as ineffective from a transactive standpoint, which questions the time and cost associated with environmental licencing. Environmental and community activists see EIA as ineffective in achieving the substantive sustainability ends they value. Neither appreciates the procedural improvements offered by licencing professionals. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how Brazil operationalised a renewed developmentalist project during the democratic period, and especially during the presidency of Lula da Silva. We use an original data set of 2,115 loans made by the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) between 2002 and 2011 to show elements of both change and continuity with Brazil’s developmentalist past. Large loans continued to flow to many of Brazil’s historic large firms and industrial sectors – as reported widely – but the data also show significant numbers of smaller loans to firms in all sectors, as well as renewed support for internationalisation and innovation. We conclude that BNDES’s lending reflects less a wholly new model of developmentalism than it does a developmentalist strategy that has been renewed and updated for the challenges and opportunities of a more market-oriented economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Assessing the changing role of the emerging powers in global climate change negotiations, with special attention to Brazil, we ask why they have agreed to voluntary reductions at home without formalising those commitments in ways that might persuade other large emitters to make similar binding commitments. We argue that for very large emitters, the climate issue does not evince the ‘global commons’ logic often attributed to it. Instead, since their actions can directly affect climate outcomes alone or in small groupings, large emitters are more responsive to domestic cost-benefit calculations, making international commitments based on shifting interest group pressures at home. In Brazil, a coalition of ‘Baptists and bootleggers’ found principled and interest-driven reasons to support new climate commitments after 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]