The Brazilian Elections and the Prospects for Norwegian Cooperation in the Amazon Rainforest
How can the presidential election in Brazil affect international cooperation to preserve the Amazon rainforest?
Global networks in national governance? Changes of professional expertise in Amazon environmental governance
In 2019, wildfires in the Amazon renewed international concern about Brazilian environmental policy, led by Jair Bolsonaro. As one of the biggest repositories of the world's biodiversity, the Amazon Rainforest has been a source of concern in global environmental governance. Given this salience, one would expect that domestic governance would be highly permeated by professionals with international circulation and that transnational ties would be a central target of Bolsonaro's populist nationalistic perspective. In this article, I seek to understand whether and how professionals involved in policymaking in the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment are connected to national and international organizations, by analyzing the networks of career paths of high-ranking staff in the Rousseff, Temer and Bolsonaro administrations. The data show a consistently low percentage of ties between professionals and international organizations. However, the types of international experience and knowledge that are deemed important shifted significantly under Bolsonaro. This publication is part of the Market for Anarchy project.
Networked territoriality: A processual–relational view on the making (and makings) of regions in world politics
This article proposes a processual–relational perspective on region-making and its effects in world politics. It revisits the concepts of regionalism and regionalisation to unearth the relational mechanisms underlying these archetypical pathways of regional emergence. Regionalism refers to the bounding of regions – the definition of its inside and outside, and of which actors fall on either side. Regionalisation denotes the binding of regions, the amalgamations of relations around a shared territoriality. I argue that regions affect world politics in their making through the boundaries raised and relations produced in the process. I then mobilise network theory and analysis to propose a framework for studying the making and makings of regions. Regions’ binding and bounding are rooted in brokerage dynamics that sustain clusters of relations denser inside a regional boundary, rather than outside, and allow some actors to control interactions across that boundary. I illustrate this framework with a case study on the emergence of the Amazon as a region in world politics. I analyse interaction networks in UN-level environmental negotiations involving the ecosystem. The analysis shows how the making of the Amazon has been tied to preserving the position of Amazonian states as the main brokers, speaking for and acting on behalf of the region.
Asha Ali
Asha Ali is an Advisor in the Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development where she focuses on climate, peace and security, the effectivenes...
Transnational Ecosystems Cooperation is Taking off
Lorax in Motion: Mapping Amazon Ecosystem Networks
This is the second in our “Lorax in Motion” series, which reports on our reflections from the project as it unfolds.
Electronic Payment Technology and Tax Capacity: Evidence from Uruguay’s Financial Inclusion Reform
We are excited to announce this semester’s second webinar in our Tax for Development Webinar Series featuring Anne Brockmeyer talking about financial inclusion reform in Uruguay.
In the shadow of the virus Varieties of power in the COVID-19 crisis in Venezuela
While all states face massive challenges when responding to COVID-19, some are in a more precarious position than others. In Venezuela, the pandemic arrived at the worst possible time for its citizens. Facing one of the deepest economic crises outside of wartime in recent years, its consequences have spilled over to all aspect of social life.1 However, the timing seems to have suited the leaders of the Venezuelan regime well. Rather than constituting a threat to the stability of a regime that has lost both democratic legitimacy and the capacity to provide services and security, the government of Nicolas Maduro (2013-present) has seemingly managed to consolidate itself after several years of instability. The starting point of the discussion is an apparent paradox: how can a regime with neither legitimacy nor capacity, two commonly invoked criteria for effective crisis management, strengthen itself during a crisis such as that spurred by COVID-19? The brief presents an overview of how the Venezuelan regime has responded to COVID-19, and how the government of Nicolás Maduro has applied different strategies to consolidate a favorable political status quo. It takes as its starting point three concepts, namely “state capacity,” “legitimacy,” and “power,” all of which are frequently upheld as fundamental for understanding the varying ways in which states have responded to the pandemic. It highlights how relative power relations have shifted in recent years, and how the pandemic has contributed to skewing the balance of power further in favor of the Maduro government.
Paul Beaumont
Paul Beaumont holds a Ph.D. in International Relations/International Environmental Studies and Development from the Norwegian University of Life S...