This well-documented and engaging monograph gives a detailed overview of the history of environmental activism in Brazil and explains the workings of the Brazilian state and its civil society through the eyes of two savvy analysts. Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck have studied Brazil’s institutions and environmental movement for over two decades. Greening Brazil synthesizes questions of governance, environmental history, and the interconnections between state and civil society.In previous works, Hochstetler and Keck successfully explored theoretical approaches to the formation of modern civil society in Latin America. In this monograph they analyze the mechanisms through which the processes of developing environmental institutions took root, highlighting the strengths and contradictions of these processes and pointing to the agents and alliances that made them possible. Combining local and global narratives, the authors connect concrete aspects of Brazilian politics and history to the international context of environmental agreements and conferences. For instance, they correctly underline the importance that individual and personal connections play in the Brazilian state and suggest that progressive environmental legislation is not matched by efficient law enforcement. On the same note, Brazilian environmental agencies were constantly reshuffled, each time redefining their focus and causing, according to the authors, no small uncertainty for political actors and their potential international partners (p. 39). For the sake of their American audience, the authors untangle the levels of Brazilian bureaucracy and their change over time. When possible, they translate terms and agencies into their American equivalents. This is no small feat, since some aspects of the legal system seem tortuous even for Brazilians and since some of the transformations cited in the book — such the expansion of collective rights and the creation of the public ministry (something akin to district attorneys) — were nothing short of revolutionary for the formation of Brazil’s civil society. Hochstetler and Keck’s insights will benefit not only those interested in environmental governance but also a broader range of scholars investigating the Brazilian state and bureaucracy.The authors organize the book chronologically and thematically. The first three chapters cover the establishment of environmental institutions since the 1950s and identify three waves of environmental activism. The first wave, from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, gave birth to Brazil’s oldest conservation organizations and its scientific research institutions. The country had embraced a nationalist and developmentalist mentality, and the generation that created Brazil’s first state environmental institutions was strongly influenced by this logic. The second wave emerged during the period of political liberalization, roughly from 1974 to the late 1980s. New activist organizations emerged in tandem with and sometimes embedded in larger changes in the Brazilian civil society that was advocating improved social conditions and a democratic political process. This environmental and social activism, according to the authors, helped to shape the 1988 Constitution. The third wave of activism, in existence since the late 1980s, has been marked “by the triple challenge of democratic restoration, economic crisis, and an exponential increase in foreign contact” (p. 63).The last two chapters apply these three waves of Brazilian environmentalism in case studies about forest and urban environment, the two poles that constituted, not always harmoniously, the basis of the environmental agenda in Brazil. It is an opportune and necessary shift. On the one hand, the Amazon has been a key theme for Brazilian environmentalism; on the other hand, since the mid-1990s, approximately 40 percent of all Brazilian governmental and nongovernmental environmental organizations focused on urban environmental issues, understandably reflecting the urban majority of the Brazilian population (p. 186).Greening Brazil is most successful when it analyzes environmental politics as embedded within national politics and, using over 20 years of interviews, highlights individuals’ trajectories in environmental and social activism. From this perspective, the authors stress the importance of politicization of environmental activism; neutrality was not an option if environmentalism was to gain legitimacy in the political arena in Brazil. The book is less successful in discussing the role of private business, which both resisted the environmental agenda proposed by the government and environmentalists and co-opted this agenda through public relations campaigns. It is also not always consistent in showing the connection of international and local agencies and initiatives. But overall, Greening Brazil is a fundamental book for the history of world environmentalism, drawing from invaluable sources such as the authors’ interviews with Chico Mendes and Herbert de Souza (Betinho). In fact, the long connection of Hochstetler and Keck with Brazilian environmentalism makes them, not unlike their interviewees, also actors in the narrative they constructed.
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Jul 1, 2010
Giulliana Mondelli + 1
Open Access