Kathryn Hochstetler is Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico. She is a coauthor of Sovereignty, Democracy, and Global Civil Society: State-Society Relations at UN World Conferences and a coeditor of Palgrave Advances in International Environmental Politics.

Margaret E. Keck is Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil and a coauthor of Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics.

Greening Brazil

Environmental Activism in State and SocietyBy Kathryn Hochstetler Margaret E. Keck

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4048-5

Contents

LIST OF TABLES…………………………………………………………………………….viiiPREFACE…………………………………………………………………………………..ixLIST OF ACRONYMS AND ORGANIZATIONS…………………………………………………………..xvIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………11 Building Environmental Institutions National Environmental Politics and Policy…………………232 National Environmental Activism The Changing Terms of Engagement……………………………..633 From Protest to Project The Third Wave of Environmental Activism……………………………..974 Amaznia………………………………………………………………………………..1405 From Pollution Control to Sustainable Cities………………………………………………..186Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..223APPENDIX: LIST OF INTERVIEWS………………………………………………………………..231NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………….239BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………249INDEX…………………………………………………………………………………….273

Chapter One

Building Environmental Institutions: National Environmental Politics and Policy

In this chapter we introduce key components of national environmental institutions as they were constructed from the 1970s to the present, in roughly chronological order. Institutional innovation took place against a variety of political backdrops: the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985; the political opening that began in the mid-1970s and continued through the promulgation of a new constitution in 1988; challenges to authoritarian structures and patterns of decision making dating back much further than 1964; and the inherent difficulty of assuming new public responsibilities in a time of economic crisis, tight budgets, and diminished state capacity. Environmental institutions introduced during the military regime had to find creative ways to circumvent the opposition of powerful developmentalist currents in both state and society. During the democratic opening, environmental movements demanded not only new policies but also new venues in which they could participate. They were not alone-other civil society organizations that emerged during the transition mistrusted the state’s ability (or desire) to look out for the public interest, to say nothing of its capacity to do so.

The development of state environmental institutions thus took place in a period of considerable political upheaval, from which it was by no means insulated. Environmentalism itself became a lightning rod for debate over whose interests were being defended, and for what purposes, domestic or foreign. At certain moments, as during the furor in 1988-89 over high rates of deforestation in the Amazon, institutional changes were at least partly motivated by a desire to placate foreign interests. Nonetheless, where domestic actors were ready to take advantage of these openings, they did not remain changes made purely for foreign consumption, or as Brazilians would say, “para ingles ver” (for the English to see). Although international considerations sometimes enter the picture, the national process that we portray here was primarily structured by domestic concerns. Similar interactions took place in many state and municipal governments, and in new collaborative organs formed at both these levels. We particularly focus on how institutional changes at the national level were affected by and in turn affected the relationship between state institutions and societal actors, by exploring in greater detail two key moments of change: the National Constituent Assembly that wrote Brazil’s 8th Constitution, promulgated in 1988, and the process set in motion by passage of a law to protect diffuse public interests, in 1985.

Brazil’s military government has a deservedly poor reputation for its treatment of many environmental matters (Guimares 1991; Mahar 1989; Zirker and Henberg 1994). Still, unlike most of its counterparts in the region, it did begin creating a regulatory and institutional framework for environmental protection. The regime issued nineteen federal laws, or decree laws, and twenty decrees on the environment during its years in power (compiled from Republic of Brazil 1991), besides establishing a national environmental agency in 1973 and a national system of environmental policy in 1981. By contrast, the Argentina junta that took power in 1976 dismantled an existing environmental agency (Hochstetler 2003), and the Chilean military government’s ideological bias against a large state role restricted its environmental capacity building (Silva 1997).

Although environmental policy and agencies have a much longer history in Brazil than in its neighbors, early environmental capacities fit with the peculiar politics of military government. The regime’s agenda embraced environmental policies aimed at rationalizing resource use, such as data collection on the physical environment or establishment of standards (Monteiro 1981, 30-31), but environmental regulations could not challenge the military’s security and developmentalist priorities, nor could they draw on broader participation. To get around this obstacle, Brazil’s first national environmental secretary, Paulo Nogueira Neto, employed what he calls “environmental guerilla activities” and relied on the authority of his reputation as a scientist rather than seeking support from fellow environmentalists. This institutional framework was remade several times after the military left power (see table 1.1 and discussion below). Besides increasing the size of environmental agencies, governments during the transition made rhetorical commitments to democratic participation in decision making that environmentalists struggled to make real in practice. As in other domains of the transition, opposition elites and impatient citizens seized small openings and enlarged them further still (Alves 1985).

Success in obtaining legislation in Brazil was no guarantee that it would be enforced, or even enacted. Most ordinary legislation requires further, complementary legislation to establish procedures for implementation-something that elsewhere frequently occurs within the administrative bureaucracy. Even then, the power to monitor compliance and sanction violations may be lodged in one or more other agencies, or nowhere at all. When Brazilian environmentalists fight for new legislation to curb environmental abuses, they know that its enforcement will often require an entirely new struggle. Moreover, democracies differ a great deal in legal culture and in assumptions about the law’s application. In Brazil the law’s application is widely understood to be socially contingent (McAllister 2004). Brazilian elites expect special treatment; the less powerful expect to be victimized rather than protected by the police. For the powerful, there has always been a jeito-a way around things, generally understood to involve a present or future exchange of favors, though not necessarily a bribe (Barbosa 1992; Da Matta 1987). The powerful expect the state to pay attention to their concerns; the less powerful do not. In this context, finding ways to operationalize environmental goals and make them stick is environmentalists’ greatest challenge. Still, legislation and regulations, however formal, create legitimate instruments for trying to hold the state or firms accountable for their failure to act-a process in which an increasingly powerful Ministerio Publico (roughly translatable as Public Attorney’s Office) would prove a crucial ally.

Another source of unpredictability in Brazilian public administration is the appointments process. Most policy-making positions are filled by political appointment in Brazil, either directly by the chief executive or indirectly by his or her appointed minister or secretary. At the end of the 1980s the Brazilian president had personal appointments power over fifty thousand jobs, compared with several thousand for the president of the United States and several dozen for Japan’s prime minister (Schneider 1991, 6). The figure for Brazil dropped to just over 21,000 jobs in 2005, three-quarters of which were filled by people who had in fact passed the civil service exam (Brazil Forum, 16-22 July 2005). Appointments structure decision making, and because elites build networks as they circulate through the bureaucracy over the course of a career, they structure interagency relations as well. Although someone appointed to a position of authority in an agency may be someone who has made a career within that agency, he or she could as easily be a complete outsider. Especially with technical agencies such as environmental agencies, the appointments process is central to explaining fluctuations in an agency’s influence and attitudes over time.

Elites dependent upon political appointments generally spend part of their careers outside government as well. Just as some of them-what Schneider calls the “political tcnicos” (1991, 6)-become brokers and intermediaries within and among agencies, they may also become brokers linking networks of public officials with pressure groups or social movements outside politics. Personal connections remain central to Brazilian bureaucratic politics, and the personal trajectories of key officials allow them to accumulate social capital upon which they can draw for later action. During the period that we examine, newly elected governors or mayors often named people with environmental experience to administrative positions, helping to maintain the fluidity of state-society relations noted in the Introduction. The appointments process presents some clear opportunities for political engagement, but also undermines the institutionalization of policies and practices in the bureaucracy.

Building Environmental Institutions in Brazil: The First Environmental Secretariat

Modern Brazilian environmental politics began in the 1960s, as the military regime actively consolidated legislation relevant to the environment (Monteiro 1981). Between 1965 and 1970 the forest, hunting, and mining codes were rewritten, and between 1965 and 1969 a sequence of laws was passed leading to the National Sanitation Policy (Poltica Nacional de Saneamento). In 1971 a special commission in the Chamber of Deputies held a three-day conference to discuss the problem of pollution, debating the establishment of a national pollution control program. By 1972 there were at least thirty-four public organs at the federal level, distributed among nine ministries and one secretariat of state, whose decisions had direct or indirect impacts on environmental policy.

Inspired by the Stockholm Conference, Brazil’s military government took the next step of consolidating some of those responsibilities in a Special Secretariat of the Environment (SEMA) at the federal level. Only eleven countries had such an agency at the time. The new institution was charged with promoting conservation of the environment and rational use of natural resources. It was also to set national norms and standards with regard to pollution (Monteiro 1981, 30). Paulo Nogueiro Neto was named the first environmental secretary, a post he would hold for twelve years (Guimares 1991; interviews with Nogueira Neto 1991, 1992). The secretariat began in 1973 with almost no budget and just three employees occupying two rooms in the Ministry of the Interior. It was ill equipped to challenge the much larger and wealthier bureaucracies administering the military regime’s economic and security policies, often damaging to the environment. SEMA therefore defined its domain narrowly, and relied heavily on the informal strategies and networking of Nogueira Neto.

Nogueira Neto, a lawyer and biologist, had been an environmental activist in So Paulo since the mid-1950s. In 1955 he co-founded one of Brazil’s first conservation associations, the Association in Defense of the Environment (Associao em Defesa do Meio Ambiente), after campaigning to support Governor Jnio Quadros’s proposal for a protected forest reserve in the area of Pontal do Paranapanema, in the southwestern part of the state. Active in international conservation circles, he was named to the executive board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1970 (IUCN Bulletin 2 (1970), 14).

Nogueira Neto had few allies in the government. The economic and foreign affairs ministries were openly mistrustful, believing that environmental concerns could create obstacles for Brazilian development. He describes the reigning view as one according to which “Brazil was an island under siege by the rest of the world … that … had to defend itself” (interview with Nogueira Neto 1992). Itamaraty, the foreign ministry, believed that developed countries would make attention to the environment into an instrument of imperialist domination. The economic agencies in government were similarly hostile, and Minister Delfim Neto continuously blocked resources for the agency.

However, personal networks helped. Nogueira Neto made friends with diplomats, who respected his status as a university professor and recognized his political lineage. The new secretary’s great-grandfather had been a presidential advisor, and his father a federal deputy; he knew how to move in political circles. Relationships with the press were likewise good. Once again, personal networks were crucial. Nogueira Neto’s father had been exiled under Vargas’s regime alongside Julio Mesquita, owner of the Estado de So Paulo media group, and he had spent holidays with Julio Neto, the current owner. Rogrio Marinho, brother of the head of the Globo media empire, Roberto Marinho, also became a good friend. So Estado de So Paulo and Globo were consistently supportive, as was the newspaper Jornal do Brasil more occasionally.

In the stories that Nogueira Neto tells about his tenure as environmental secretary, personal networks, publicity, and jeito were the source of the advances made. He tried to portray his position as a strictly technical one; his only possible source of authority was superior technical knowledge. Startled by the effectiveness with popular opinion of his claim of this knowledge-and how publicity and public opinion could move even a military government-he sought first to alert public opinion to the problem of polluted beaches, a problem that had long concerned him as a biologist. And convinced that people only become motivated when a problem is dramatized, he gave an interview in Santos, on the So Paulo coast, saying that marine pollution along its beaches was a potential source of hepatitis. Authorities rarely made such statements at the time, and that week the Santos beaches were virtually deserted. The mayor countered by calling upon journalists to witness him swimming at the city’s beach, and the hotel keepers in Santos accused Nogueira Neto of trying to promote hotels in the interior of the state. But the result was that the state government resumed construction on underwater sewage pipelines, work that had been suspended for being too costly. The beach remained polluted, but much less so than before. The Santos case was the new secretary’s first lesson in the power of public opinion. He subsequently repeated the experiment in Salvador, Bahia, where the state government asked him to help resolve the same problem. “Had I gone first to the government, they would have said, ‘we’ll look into it, we’ll see …,'” he recalled. “But once it’s in the newspaper …” (interview with Nogueira Neto 1992).

A conservationist at heart, Nogueira Neto lamented how ineffectively the current institutions were protecting forests, even those inside conservation units. “We engaged in a kind of environmental guerilla activity, one aspect of which was to occupy available space,” he recounted. Since national parks and forests were under the auspices of the Brazilian Institute for Forestry Development (IBDF), then part of the Ministry of Agriculture, the new secretariat came up with a creative alternative: ecological stations set up in parallel to the IBDF’s parks, covering around 3.2 million hectares of land by the early 1990s. The term “station” (estao) evoked experimentation and research rather than conservation per se, so when the secretariat submitted a bill authorizing the creation of ecological stations, it passed unanimously. The law allowed 10 percent of the areas to be used or modified for research purposes. State governments ceded land, with permission for their universities to use it. INCRA, the federal land reform institute, allocated around 2 million hectares in the state of Amazonas, the navy provided an island on the Paraguai River of which the secretariat had not even been aware, and organs like the Funding Agency for Studies and Projects (FINEP) financed research. Even agencies whose activities financed destruction, like SUDAM (Agency for Amazonian Development), contributed money. This gave the secretariat access to resources that IBDF could not get, despite its formal responsibility for protected areas.

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Excerpted from Greening Brazilby Kathryn Hochstetler Margaret E. Keck Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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