Towards a new development architecture: Brazil and optimum environmental governance

Abstract

The present paper starts from a presentation of the background situation of the environmental question in Brazil in section two. In section three, some references about the way formal environmental governance evolved in the country are provided. The participatory feature of environmental policy-making in Brazil is described in section four. In section five, the reality of environmental governance is set against the backdrop of the institutional and legal framework that has been built up in Brazil. On the basis of that picture, pertinent research questions towards optimum environmental governance as part of development are posed in section six. It is important to stress the need for a well-conceived framework of rules and institutions for a new development architecture centred round the tenets of socio-ecological sustainability. Nature has to be taken into account for any successful long-term development strategy. Some of nature´s resources simply do not have substitutes. Thus society, through optimum environmental governance, must tackle actual biophysical limits to the economic process. To ignore them raises dire risks.