Environment governance in Brazil: between social-environmentalism and green economy

Abstract

The Rio+20 meetings represents the most recent tuning point of the global environmental governance. Brazil occupies a privileged position as a democratic emerging economy and it is a home of large portion of the natural resources and environmental services of the planet. By the same token, the country presents innovative socio-environmental policies, such as sustainable territoriality, high proportion of renewable energy and ambitious targets of carbon emission reduction. However, this scenario contradicts the current Brazilian economy development program, which is mostly based on commodities. Besides, there is a new structure of relations among different actors of the society, including the public sector, and this structure generates new processes at different scales global, national and local. These new multi-scale structures and processes gave rise to new inquiries with regard to implications of environmental governance and climate change in Brazil. This book deals with processes of changing among social, political and economic contexts from 1992 to 2012 and their consequences to current governance in Brazil. The chapters encompass different aspects of socio-environmental issues from a common conceptual framework and by focusing on processes and interactions in different ecosystems and production systems. Finally, it is worth mentioning that each chapter was reviewed by two anonymous experts on a double-blind review. (AU)