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Work-in-progress

Pathways of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest

*Invited to revise and resubmit

*Co-winner of the ASA Environmental Sociology Student Paper Award in 2025

* Awarded the ASA Sociology of Development Section Graduate Student Paper Award in 2024 

* Co-winner of the ASA Political Sociology Section Graduate Student Paper Award in 2024

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As cases of successful decarbonization are rare, we know little about how states build the capacity to reduce CO2 emissions. This article conceptualizes climate change as a domain of state-building, with globalizing and scientizing dimensions, and follows how state capacity and elites’ resistance interact overtime. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival work, and administrative data, I provide a comparative-historical analysis of Brazil’s pathway to decarbonization from 1985 to 2022, suggesting four policy regimes. In what I call Sheltered Experimentation; environmental bureaucrats leverage transnational and scientific ties to protect themselves from politics and increase state capacity. The state then implements policy expansively, and draws attention of elites, through Infrastructural Clarification. This process leads to Institutional Stalemates: the equilibrium in which policies could potentially reduce emissions, but elites disallow vast transformation. Political shocks can tip stalemates into State Dismantling, when the environmental state itself is at danger. I conclude by discussing varied pathways to state performance and my contributions to political-historical and environmental sociologies, as well as green transition debates.

Financialization as Transnational Policy Insulation: Climate Finance in Brazil, 1990-2020

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Billions of dollars are poised to finance the global green transition—how will these funds reach the Global South, and with what effects? In this article, I show how funders,lawyers and bureaucrats create financial intermediaries leveraging at least four socio-legal strategies that can potentially safeguard policy: (1) capitalization or who can finance an intermediary; (2) governance or what are the decision-making processes embedded in an intermediary; (3) procurement or which legal entity holds the funds; and (4) domestication or how is the intermediary connected to policy. To illustrate the utility of my framework, I adopt a sequential mixed methods design using the case of climate finance in Brazil. First, I build a transnational climate finance dataset containing over 3600 grant-level payments to state and non-state actors in Brazil from 1990 to 2020. I show the centrality of climate funds as financial intermediaries. In step two, with interview and archival data, I show how and why lawyers, bureaucrats, and donors designed these intermediaries with specific capitalization, governance, procurement, and domestication strategies to safeguard climate policy. I conclude by discussing the effects of said strategies and calling attention towards how these strategies can safeguard policies in times of democratic backsliding.

National Backlash and the Defunding of the Liberal World Order: Evidence from International Geneva, 2000-2023”

* data collection methodology and descriptive findings are available here.

The Financial Sources of International G

Participation in heterogeneous institutions at the international level explains the diffusion of liberal and illiberal norms. But how can nation-states weaken the world-society? The United Nations system is often approached as a crucial site for global liberal script development, but its maintenance usually goes underappreciated by sociologists. In this article, we introduce a new dataset to answer questions related to UN financing. We compiled and harmonized hundreds of financial reports by international organizations headquartered in Geneva, amounting to over 30’000 payments since 2000 by state and non-state actors. Using regression models, we show that after multiple controls, the liberal world society is mainly financed by Western governments with a small percentage of private American foundations. Defunding of the world society, in turn, follows from democratic backsliding.  We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for how sociology conceptualizes the global liberal space and its relationship to the domestic level.

Whose Merit, which Redistribution? Deservingness and Elite's Preferences in Brazil and South Africa [with Graziella Moraes Silva]

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Whose merit matters for which type of redistribution? Scholarship on merit has often examined the deservingness of the rich and the undeservingness of the poor separately. Research on redistribution, in turn, has emphasized different types of redistribution individually or approached it as a unified concept. In this article, we reconcile these debates by arguing that different perceptions of merit matter for different types of redistributive policies. Using original survey data from randomly selected elites in Brazil and South Africa, we examine how perceptions of elite and poor deservingness shape support for taxation policies, cash-based redistribution, and in-kind assistance. We find that belief in elite merit is associated with opposition to taxation, while seeing the poor as undeserving reduces support for both cash transfers and in-kind assistance. These relationships are especially strong in Brazil. In South Africa, race plays a significant role, suggesting that national context and political history shape how elites use moral frames to justify redistribution. We conclude by proposing that the underlying level of coercion in different types of redistribution policies are linked to different dimensions of merit.

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