Global networks in national governance? Changes of professional expertise in Amazon environmental governance

Abstract

In 2019, wildfires in the Amazon renewed international concern about Brazilian environmental policy, led by Jair Bolsonaro. As one of the biggest repositories of the world's biodiversity, the Amazon Rainforest has been a source of concern in global environmental governance. Given this salience, one would expect that domestic governance would be highly permeated by professionals with international circulation and that transnational ties would be a central target of Bolsonaro's populist nationalistic perspective. In this article, I seek to understand whether and how professionals involved in policymaking in the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment are connected to national and international organizations, by analyzing the networks of career paths of high-ranking staff in the Rousseff, Temer and Bolsonaro administrations. The data show a consistently low percentage of ties between professionals and international organizations. However, the types of international experience and knowledge that are deemed important shifted significantly under Bolsonaro.

Introduction: Is the time nigh for ecological security?

“…This research agenda at once supports McDonald’s contention that ecological security is not so divorced from policy practice it might at first blush appear: many of these governance arrangements ostensibly recognize the inherent interconnectedness and codependence of humans upon the ecosystems within which they are embedded. Yet, these nascent governance arrangements (which number in the hundreds—see Maglia and Rowe, forthcoming) also highlight the difficulty of realizing ecological security: the obstacles that stand between going from recognizing in principle the need to secure the earth’s ecosystems and the practice of prioritizing it at the expense of other economic, political, and security interests (see Wilson Rowe’s contribution below).…”

Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea

“…However, a significant subset (62 cross-border ecosystems with four or more adjacent states) is governed by initiatives anchored in the ecosystem itself. These initiatives are often based on environmental issues but frequently include or expand to include a broader suite of problems (see Maglia and Wilson Rowe, n.d. for an overview and database and Church, 2020 for a comparative study of environmentally specific ecoregional institutions).…”

The Key to the Sustainability and Conservation of Extractive Reserves in the Amazon

“…For example, deforestation, burning, mining, and business agribusiness have resulted in degradation of the forests that is visible from space, altered climatic conditions, caused biodiversity losses, and hindered sustainable livelihoods in the Amazon [12][13][14][15][16][17]. This has drawn the attention of national and international communities and led to the adoption of new measures in an attempt to mitigate the damage to natural and environmental resources [18][19][20].…”