State agents of green capitalism. The political ecology of Brazil’s international environmental cooperation from PPG-7 to the Amazon Fund (1989-2019)

This dissertation examines the historical formation of environmental aid from industrialized countries to conserve forests in Latin America at the end of the 1980s and its redefinition and integration into climate finance in the 21st century. Thus analyzing the strategic agency of international cooperation in accumulation frontiers, the thesis contributes to theorizing the climate crisis and the commodification of nature. Drawing on two case studies from 1989 to 2019, the Pilot Program for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests (PPG7) and the Amazon Fund, funded by the G7, the World Bank, and Norway, I examine how environmental cooperation promoted public institutions, technologies, and constituencies for the integration of forests into global trade and climate governance. Since the late 1980s, donor pilot initiatives have heavily invested in decentralizing environmental regulation and territorial monitoring technologies. Brazil has been an international laboratory for developing zoning, environmental registry, and inventory methods. The study shows that technical aid agencies, ecological concepts, and funding to civil society organizations have constituted neoliberal conservation's global and extractive frontier assemblages. Likewise, it shows how initiatives have shaped carbon-focused conservation approaches and contributed to establishing carbon market proposals under the Paris Agreement of the UNFCCC. Finally, the study sheds light on popular resistance to this transnational project, highlighting labor and peasant movement-based conceptional alternatives for compensation for the cost of mitigating capitalist environmental deterioration. The study challenges the conventional assumption of antagonism between donor and recipient governments regarding environmental policy. Instead, it argues that shifting international and domestic protagonists shape strategic pilot initiatives and promote the financialization and privatization of forest management. The study reflects the increasing cooptation of the environmental agenda by the multinational agriculture and extractivist sectors in Latin America and globally.