Conference Agenda

This paper unpacks former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s (2018-2022) climate rhetoric by critically analyzing his discourses as part of an international and societal trend of right-wing populist policymakers’ narratives on climate denial and securitization. Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has been controversial since before he even took office. Since his early days as a congressman, Bolsonaro’s discourses became headlines for mobilizing public hatred as he often garnished attention for being politically incorrect. While Bolsonaro’s convoluted agenda touched upon many subjects, perhaps one of the fields where his discourses found a significant reverberation, not unlike other right-wing populist politicians, concerns climate change and the environment. Whereas at international conferences the Bolsonaro administration sought to present a conciliatory tone to lessen international backlash from activists and leaders petitioning to reach carbon neutrality and reduce Amazon deforestation, domestically Brazil’s former president maintained that environmental protection impedes economic development and recurringly attacked environmental defenders. Such incongruities illustrate how Bolsonaro-era environmental matters where talked about and managed through a multiple, and often contradictory, means. By way of Critical Discourse Analysis, we present how Bolsonaro and his administration instrumentalized the environment and climate change in complex and, to some extent, novel manners typical of populist elected officials. We argue that unveiling Bolsonaro’s climate rhetoric highlights how he has concurrently denied and invisibilized environmental concerns during his administration, while conveniently also positioning environmental matters at the highest level of policymaking via securitizing the Amazon Rainforest and linking environmental concerns with a narrative enmeshed with Brazil’s national sovereignty concerns. The paper offers three unique but interrelated contributions: (i) it provides a first overview of Bolsonaro’s climate narrative during his presidency, intricating domestic and international discourses as part of a common rhetoric; (ii) it complicates common-held perceptions around populist discourse on climate change, meaningfully exploring the entangled contradictions in Bolsonaro’s usage of the climate and the earth system in his speeches; and (iii) it conceptually explores our findings within the field of research on far-right environmentalism and authoritarian populism discourses, linking it with the Earth System Governance network’s research findings on democracy and power. We find out that these rhetorical contradictions could be explained by how, at a societal level, Bolsonaro's use of different language and framings to talk about the environment both domestically and internationally serves the purpose of inflaming his nationalist, militarized, religious, and conservative supporters, thus shifting his discourse schemata to fit his populist purposes.

There is increasing support for populist parties around the globe and increasing evidence that this may fuel backlash to climate policy. Research suggests that populist attitudes are deemed key for explaining climate change skepticism while right-wing populist parties have detrimental effects on greenhouse gas emissions and climate policy production. At the same time, however, there is also increasing support for green parties, the arguably strongest advocates of ambitious climate policy while empirical research remains divided about positive green party effects on climate policy. This bipolar setting begs the question whether and how the two party families, and competition between them, affect climate policy production. The present paper addresses this question. Building on a comprehensive cross-national dataset, it studies the impact of populist and green parties inside and outside of government on climate policy production in 22 European democracies between 1990 and 2016. The results suggest that increased electoral competition from right-wing populist parties can drive additional climate policy efforts of green parties. These results have important implications for our understanding of partisan competition and effects in climate policy-making.

Since the end of 2021, left-wing presidents have been elected in three major Latin American economies: Gabriel Boric in Chile, Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Lula Da Silva in Brazil. All three victories have occurred by narrow margins and in the context of fractured and polarized societies, especially in Brazil. The challenges to democratic governance are mostly new, unprecedented since the first pink tide of the 2010s.

One of the characteristics of this new left -distinct from those that already governed the other major economies of Argentina and Mexico and from those that proliferated in the first decade of the 2000s- is the central relevance given to climate and environmental issues both in the campaign and in the initial months of their mandates.

In this paper, we set out to identify the impacts of these three administrations -also called the new pink tide- on environmental governance at the national level: Are these Presidents consistently changing the way the environment is governed? Which areas have been privileged?

To achieve our objective, we analyzed policies, policy proposals and, presidential speeches in four main areas: energy (including both the place of fossil fuels and renewables in the future of countries' development); forest management (including deforestation control policies, extremely relevant in the cases of Brazil and Colombia and Chile as a success story as it has a negative balance of emissions in the forestry sector); agriculture (particularly in Brazil where emissions from the sector amount to 27% of the total and an agribusiness and family farming sector has emerged that is internalizing decarbonization) and manufacturing (particularly the prospects for green reindustrialization). In analyzing these sectors, we will also assess the role of the international community: Do these presidents actively participate in international environmental governance, and do they emphasize the importance of international actors in achieving their goals?

Our results will help to identify not only areas of divergence and convergence, but also to understand potential areas of cooperation between these countries and, potentially, at the Latin American level. Our contribution to the lens of architecture and agency will be the study of a new phenomenon in Latin America that tends to converge with similar processes that have occurred in the European Union in the last decade.

Understanding how to make climate policy stick has become a key focus among scholars working on decarbonization and policy feedback in recent years. This requires that climate policies are not only adopted but also remain durable in the face of often-fractious post-adoption politics, and ideally also enable policy stringency to be ramped up over time. However, while much attention has been given to interest-based competition (e.g. costs and benefits) and cognition (e.g. beliefs, values, learning), deeper struggles over the socio-political construction of legitimacy in domestic climate policy action remain largely overlooked. Durability of climate policy will crucially depend on competing processes of legitimation and delegitimation. Delegitimation is a threat to climate policy action by undermining its justificatory and authoritative basis, potentially leading to policy removal and undermining the wider policy agenda.

This paper examines mechanisms of delegitimation in domestic climate policy action and the consequences for ongoing climate policymaking. It comparatively analyses cases of abrupt delegitimation within backlash to hard/coercive climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phase-outs) in several countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, France). Such backlash, where delegitimation plays a central role, becomes an important concern within fractious and polarised contemporary political contexts. Potential mechanisms of delegitimation include argumentative (e.g., rhetoric, campaigns), structural (e.g., legal challenges), or behavioural (e.g., voting, protest, noncompliance) forms. Potential consequences of delegitimation include policy repeal or weakening, destabilisation of broader policy agendas, weakened authority of policy proponents, and entrenched political divides. The cases empirically unravel mechanisms operating under various conditions, and the ways in which they lead to particular consequences. This helps to understand how processes of abrupt delegitimation operate within the broader ideational politics of domestic climate policy action.

Overall, the paper contributes to understanding interactions between authority and resistance in collective problem solving, which is crucial to advancing durable transformations in governance and society. As such, it is located at the interface of ‘Architecture and Agency’ and ‘Democracy and Power’ research lenses, and the ‘Transformations’ contextual condition.