Oxford University Press Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Brazilian Amazon

Sustainable development is often thought of as a product that can be obtained by following a prescribed course of interventions. Rather than conceptualizing it as a sweet spot of economic, ecological, and social balance, sustainable development is an ongoing process of embroilments requiring constant negotiation of often-competing aims. Sustainable development politics yield highly uneven results among different members of society and different geographic areas. As this book argues, such imbalances mean that sustainable development processes often prioritize economic over environmental goals, perpetuating and reinforcing economic and political inequalities. Governing the Rainforest looks at development and conservation efforts in the Brazilian Amazon, where the government and corporate interests bump up against those of environmentalists and local populations. This book asks why sustainable development continues to be such a powerful and influential idea in the region, and what impact it has had on various political and economic interests and geographic areas. In other words, as Eve Z. Bratman argues, sustainable development is a political practice in itself. This book offers detailed case study analysis, including of the creation of vast conservation corridors, the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, and new forms of land settlement projects. Based on a decade of Bratman's ethnographic fieldwork throughout Brazil, and particularly along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Governing the Rainforest offers a fresh take on sustainable development within a multi-level analysis of actors, discourses, and practices. Review Finally, almost three decades after Rio92 introduced the world to 'sustainable development,' we have a book that explores not just the successes or failures of this paradigm, but which also reveals the fraught, uneven, and ultimately compromised work done in its name. Bratman's vivid account of how well-intended land-use policies often reproduce the very conditions of destruction and immiseration they seek to address is a timely invitation to reimagine the transformational potential of sustainable development. ― Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon Eve Bratman has produced a powerful, readable account of what 'sustainable development' has meant for the lives of people in the Brazilian Amazon. At a time when the machinery of international development has reduced the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to a supposedly settled politics of program implementation, Bratman's profoundly unsettling account is welcome. It reminds us that goals become what governing processes make of them. ― Ken Conca, American University This book will help you understand why current president Jair Bolsanaro could completely divert Amazonian development away from any ideas linked to sustainability into deforestating monocultures of soy and grass. ― Susanna Hecht, University of California, Los Angeles Eve Bratman's penetrating case studies from the Brazilian Amazon reveal sustainable development as a multi-sited, conflict-ridden process whose policy implementation and discursive practices largely serve to accessorize, rather than attenuate, state encroachments, capital expansion, and regional imbalance of power. A must-read for students of environmental politics and international development. ― Seth W. Garfield, University of Texas at Austin About the Author Eve Z. Bratman is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College.