Environmental Change , Security , and Social Conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon

The links among environmental change, notions of security, and social conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon are multiple and complex. Successive Brazilian governments and the Brazilian military have found a distinct relationship between environmental matters and security issues through a focus on state sovereignty. This relationship is often articulated in terms of defending national sovereignty instead of preserving Brazilian ecosystems. Furthermore, the links between environmental change and social conflicts should be understood through a multi-step process of externalities, referred to here as “side-effects,” where ecological scarcities contribute to other political, social and economic conditions that more directly precipitate conflict. Hence, direct causal links between environmental change and social conflicts are rare in the Brazilian Amazon. The case of the Brazilian Amazon illustrates how governments can be subjected to intense influence from the international community. Demands from the international community have had critical impacts, both positive and negative, on the environment of the Brazilian Amazon. In recent years, the assertion of interests by some multilateral institutions (World Bank), industrialized countries (United States and Germany) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has precipitated a number of reactions from the Brazilian government. It is important to note that such reactions have often been framed in security terms. The Brazilian government has reacted with a defense of Brazilian sovereignty in the Amazon while accepting the importance of some global environmental standards and international cooperation. However, this governmental acceptance of environmental concerns is framed in terms of rights and responsibilities of states, underscoring the principle of national sovereignty and the role of national security institutions in managing the Amazon basin. Hence, environmental management in the Brazilian context remains squarely within the traditional conception of security and its preoccupation with state sovereignty. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON Does it make sense to speak of sovereignty in the Brazilian Amazon? The question can be answered by tracing the debate on Amazonian management. Applying a territorial criterion, the former Brazilian president José Sarney declared “the Amazon is ours,” in 1989 in a statement entitled Our Nature. Sarney goes on to state “[it] is situated in our territory.” The name Our Nature suggested that Brazil was entitled to exercise internal sovereignty on environmental policy. Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon rain forest has been challenged by several actors, especially NGOs, on the ecological grounds that the importance of the Amazon extends far beyond the territory of Brazil. Part of the argument is based on the fact that the Amazon rain forest extends across the borders of the sovereign territory of Brazil to neighboring states. It should be remembered that the Amazon is shared by eight states. The fixed territorial space in political terms does not always coincide with the territoriality of the ecosystems, which slices across geopolitical boundaries. Therefore, sovereignty conceived in its traditional way, as rule over a fixed, static territory, becomes problematic. An internationalized conceptualization of the Brazilian Amazon implies that in the environmental arena, sovereignty no longer merely serves as the source of the state’s claim to manage natural resources in the way it chooses without abiding by international standards. As Keohane (1995) points out, sovereignty no longer enables states to exert effective supremacy over what occurs within their territories. Rather than connoting the exercise of supremacy within a given territory, sovereignty provides the state with a legal grip on an aspect of a transnational process, whether involving multinational investment, the world’s ecology, drug dealers, or other transnationalized issues. Thus, sovereignty is less a territorially defined barrier than a bargaining resource for politics characterized by a complex transnational network (Keohane, 1995: 176-177).