From One Summit to Another

The Rio plus 20 conference of 2012 will convene in a symbolic place in Brazil, the Riocentro. There, in the 80s, an extremist military group tried to stage a terrorist attack with the intent to then blame it on leftist activists. They failed and the ensuing scandal contributed to the fall of the military regime in the mid-1980s, under increasing pressure from a huge social movement that was demanding democracy.

When the United Nations General Assembly decided to let Brazil host the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992, the national political scene was still tumultuous. At this time, the country was facing a crisis on two fronts. Economically, a succession of so-called “stabilization plans” were unable to reign in hyperinflation and to overcome a decade of economic stagnation. In the political arena, an unexpected outcome of the campaign for free elections after two decades of a military regime was a conservative government. President Fernando Collor’s government was a great disappointment for the many social movements that had supported Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva (who only almost two decades later should become the most popular presidents Brazil has seen). As a result of this disappointment, the Collor government was not able to count on the support by the environmental movement when it started to organize the Rio-92 conference. The environmental movement had become closely affiliated with the movement for the redemocratization. It had also become closely linked to the social agenda that drove the broad grassroots mobilization and influenced the public debate in the 80s. Rather than separate green/environmental and brown/social issues, the movement fused these issues into a socioenvironmental agenda.

This socioenvironmental agenda gave room to a broad spectrum of alliances between environmentalists and grassroots movements. They eventually came to understand the Rio-92 conference as an arena where their claims could be amplified, and social movements without any previous engagement in environmental issues reframed their issues in such a fashion. The Brazilian Forum of NGOs and Social Movements for the Environment and Development emerged as a result and it used the Rio-92’s Global Forum debates to highlight social issues. The forum grew and attracted national and international media attention and promoted alliances among local and global environmental groups like Greenpeace and WWF. Hence, Rio-92 was a moment of tremendous and diversified environmental mobilization outside and even against the state. Succeeding in grasping the attention of the public opinion, the movement was able to speak out and to be listened to by governments and to influence the official debates on Agenda 21.

This equation “strong socioenvironmental movement – weak national state” does not apply anymore today in Brazil. The Rio-2012 conference is arriving at a time when the situation in Brazil could hardly be more different than it was in 1992. In spite of the international economic crisis, the Brazilian society has never done better both economically and in terms of social integration. From 2004 to 2009, more than 19 million people have been lifted out of poverty and 32 millions have joined the lower middle class. President Lula has enjoyed two extremely successful terms and integrated much of the social agenda of the democracy movement of the 1980s into public policies, which has strengthened democratic rules and institutions. This is an important reason why over the last decade, socioenvironmentalism as a somewhat integrated movement built on the joint mobilization of groups devoted to brown-social and green-environmental objectives has declined. Political priorities of these two movements have overlapped less and less in recent years.

Nowadays the Brazilian environment movement is strong and globalized. However, its contestation phase seems to be over. Instead of being in opposition of state institutions and the political establishment, it has been working more and more in “partnerships” with government institutions, much like what has happened in most countries, where the green movement has joined mainstream political processes. The environmental movement has also shifted its attention toward a neoconservationist agenda, focusing almost exclusively on biodiversity and forest issues, while neglecting urban environmental and social issues. The brown and the green agenda have split. What is more, most of the environmental groups have become professionalized and highly specialized, offering themselves as administrators of environmental areas and as project and program implementers. On the other hand, this has left little room for politics and advocacy activism.

Hence, although concerns about environmental issues is growing among young people, local governments, and even private firms in Brazil, the environmental associations are no longer the mobilizing force they used to be in 1992, when they were capable of producing huge public demonstrations and to stage activist protests. Nowadays the movement’s preferential path is the negotiation table rather than the street. Even when the movement does attempt to organize environmental protests, the results have been far from the leaders’ expectations. Demonstrations against the construction of the Belo Monte Dam in the Amazonian Region and against the Brazilian Forest Code reform did not mobilize the large crowds that joined forces on the streets in the early 1990s, although they did attract media attention around the world.

The new style of activism to present environmental claims relies much more on declarations by movement leaders to the media and on symbolic direct action activities that only require a few motivated individuals (such as the campaigns for which Greenpeace has become famous) than on massive popular demonstrations, with the volume, the diversity, and the strength they reached in 1992.

What is more, over the past decade, the professionalization of environmental organizations and their partnerships with the state has benefitted both sides by improving skills and policies in the area. But it has also brought about a technicalization of the environmental discourse. In this sense, the environmentalists have now more skills and assets that they can mobilize, as they are part of an autonomous environmentalist social field, in Bourdieu’s sense. However, such autonomy has also meant a separation from other social forces, fields, and skills, and a shrinking pool of social groups it could reach and mobilize. In this sense, compared to Rio-1992, environmental groups seem much less prepared to discuss and negotiate social interests, which certainly will be at stake in Rio-2012.

Another point worth stressing concerns the emphasis of the preparatory meetings on the implementation of former agreements (Rio-1992, Agenda 21, Johannesburg) through the adoption of a new approach to economic decision making. Under the new header “green economy” environmental and economic criteria of efficiency are to be mixed. The open question is whether this green economy approach can be more successful in meeting critical economic, social, and environmental challenges than its antecessor, the sustainable development framework, which also promised to combine economic, social, and environmental objectives but has fallen far short in doing so. Moreover, it is accurate to wonder whether this new formula would be able to engage not just environmentalists and businessmen but will also be accountable and advantageous to the indigenous and traditional social groups who live in areas targeted by environmentalists for protection or management.

Two main and somehow contradictory issues are at stake in Rio-2012; one concerns legitimacy, and the other concerns efficiency. To combine the two is not an easy task. The Rio-2012 conference can be seen as a new opportunity to find a creative way to conciliate economic development, social accountability, and environmental conservation. However, the summit also entails risks. In an international landscape characterized by economic stagnation and a broad assault on social welfare policies, a new cycle of growth driven by a shift to a low-carbon economy could provide a common platform and be able to engage a wide coalition of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and social groups living in the vast forest areas of Brazil. However, an alternative scenario is also conceivable in which governments prioritize quick economic growth at almost any cost to bring back jobs and largely push environmental concerns aside.

Although intended perhaps to emulate the previous success with a broad mobilization of social forces of past decades—as its placement in such a symbolic building, the Riocentro—suggests, the Rio-2012 conference will take place in very different frameworks. National and international actors, including among them the former key player, the Environmental Movement, are quite different. Compared to Rio-1992, Rio-2012 will probably be quieter and socially less diversified. The question is whether it can become as historically important as its predecessor and can set a direction for its participants in order to be able to face the new domestic and international environmental and social challenges.