Geopolitics of Sustainable Development During the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

AbstractThe contemporary debate on sustainable development is permeating issues that cross economic and geopolitical interests at different scales, mainly because their bases reverberate in possession and appropriation of territory and development policies. Since the second half of the twentieth century, environmental issues have emerged at the center of the international geopolitical debate, materialized in numerous conferences on the environment and the proposed agendas derived from these meetings. The challenges of using and appropriating nature from a prism of Western modernity influence the dualistic conception between policies of preservation and the dynamics of a capitalist development agenda. This conception is still present in the organization of development policies in many countries, such as Brazil. The Brazilian Geopolitics has always been directed to think about the security of its borders and the guarantee of its sovereignty in the territory. This territory is marked by important ecosystems (Amazon, Cerrado, and Pantanal), located in the North and Center-West Regions of the country. These regions are part of border zones with other countries and are part of the expansion of the economic frontier of agribusiness. With the process of Brazil's insertion in the world economic system and the adoption of a policy of re-primarization of its economy, it has placed the geopolitics of sustainability in Brazil at a crossroads.Thus, in this text, we present a theoretical and conceptual review on geopolitics and sustainable development and present current data on the areas of fire occurrence in Brazil. We use data from INPE (Space Research Institute) that indicate the North and Center-West Regions of the country as the largest in outbreaks of fire. These, in turn, are directly and indirectly associated with the expansion of agricultural activities. These impacts on ecosystems affect not only biomes but traditional populations and peoples living in an organized relationship with nature. Thus, these data reinforce the need to rethink the development matrices so that the rights to a genuinely just environment is realized.KeywordsGeopoliticalSustainable developmentPolitical economyBrazil