Occasional Paper Series COD #25. Towards a New Development Architecture: Brazil and Optimum Environmental Governance

Environmental governance, understood as a framework of both formal and informal rules, institutions, processes, and behaviour that affect the way powers are exercised in the sphere of policies towards the ecosystem, has a number of comparatively advanced features in Brazil (Leis, 2000: 98). It also shows a progressive outlook, having evolved, on paper at least, in the last three decades or so, from the narrow approach of environmental protection, restricted to a few sectors of nature, to a broader sustainability- oriented perspective encompassing natural capital, ecosystem functions and the services of nature. However, from a more concrete standpoint, it must be said that Brazil still lacks certain other elements necessary for successful environmental governance. Public policies, in fact, tend to contemplate the promotion of growth before everything else, including the health of the natural environment, in spite of the commitments of official discourse to ecological sustainability especially after 1992. The outcome is a neat contrast between the progressive legislation, which presupposes active stakeholders' participation, on the one hand, and the actual situation of the prevalence of economic guidelines over the environment, taken up on an autocratic, top-down fashion, on the other . (...)