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Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries; The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity; Payments for Ecosystem Services.
Inside a Champion An Analysis of the Brazilian Development Model
in Bolivia was the subject of a symbolic conflict in 2011. Financed by BNDES, and completed by Brazilian construction giant OAS, the road was supposed to provide access to the Pacific – not least for agrarian products and raw materials from Brazil, for which China pays good money and which, until now, had to be shipped at great expense from Brazil’s Atlantic ports. In recent times, BNDES has come to be seen as the model for a potential joint development bank for the BRICS states. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is only one of the alliances among emerging economies in which Brazil has become a driving force. IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) or – in the area of climate policy – BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) can also be mentioned in this respect. Brazil’s good reputation abroad is based to a considerable extent on how other governments perceive the country in the international arena. In her article, Britta Rennkamp shows us how Brazil is developing from a hegemonic regional power into a global player. Brazil has gained a good reputation as an intermediary between governments of the American continent and between industrialized nations and the G-77 in UN climate negotiations. The country is also now playing an increasingly important role in the G-20, which for many has replaced the G-8 as an informal, but powerful, global steering committee. Europeans and European NGOs have realized to their great surprise that the social movements in Brazil and South America flatly reject the Green Economy. While the Green Economy and the Green New Deal in Europe were initially launched by the environmentalist movement as progressive concepts, movements and organizations in Latin America are increasingly coming to perceive the Green Economy as a concept of the capitalist world economy, whose capital – set free in times of crisis – is looking for new, “sustainable” strategies of exploitation. This rejection, however, is not only based on theories that are critical of the system, but is also based on real experiences – for example, “traditional peoples,” who were always among the weakest in the social fabric of Latin America, are also among the first to lose out in this model of development. We are talking about the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region, the riverside dwellers, the rubber tappers, the smallholders, and the descendents of slaves, who fought to obtain the rights to their land and who now risk losing it again to the mining giants and hydropower projects. On the other hand, these organizations have observed how legal and financial instruments are used under the term “natural capital” to lead the natural world in Latin America – above all, forests, water, and land – and its “environmental services” into a new process of exploitation. This process, as Camila Moreno and Larissa Packer describe in precise detail in their articles, goes hand in hand with compensatory measures in climate and biodiversity policies. REDD, TEEB, and PES2 as well as a new forestry law – which allows those responsible for the illegal deforestation of the past to escape punishment, and