Work-in-progress
Reach and Retrenchment of the Environmental State: Global Climate Politics in the Amazon Rainforest
* forthcoming, American Journal of Sociology
ASA Environmental Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award
ASA Sociology of Development Graduate Student Paper Award
ASA Political Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award
How do states build and lose the capacity to decarbonize? By drawing on a comparative-historical analysis of Brazil’s drastic reduction and later resurgence of carbon dioxide emissions from 1985 to 2022, this article describes climate change as an emerging state-building domain with global and scientific dimensions. It uncovers a new pathway for decarbonization: domestic bureaucrats and national scientists build state capacity by leveraging transnational ties that provide shelter from politics and resources for policy experimentation. Over time, these ties help consolidate the infrastructural reach of decarbonization policies, but new policies conflict with economic elites’ interests. Opposing elites organize and stall implementation, but capacity remains in place due to a minimal agreement that decarbonization is a state responsibility. Democratic backsliding triggers the collapse of that agreement: opponents occupy the bureaucracy and erode the foundations of state capacity by targeting the global and scientific basis of decarbonization capacity.
Insulating Decarbonization from Bolsonaro: How Transnational Finance Can Shield Policy in Times of Democratic Backsliding
*full draft available
In times of democratic erosion and climate crisis, insulating policy funds is critical to sustaining long-term state capacity and ensuring policy survival. This article shows how funders, lawyers, and bureaucrats create financial intermediaries that help safeguard policy by leveraging four socio-legal strategies: (1) capitalization — who is allowed to finance the intermediary; (2) governance — the decision-making processes embedded in the intermediary; (3) procurement — which legal entity holds and manages the funds; and (4) domestication — how the intermediary is connected to domestic public policy. To illustrate the framework’s utility, I use a sequential mixed-methods design centered on climate finance in Brazil. First, I construct an original dataset of over 3,600 transnational climate-related grants to Brazilian state and non-state actors (1990–2020), showing the central role of financial intermediaries. Second, drawing on interviews and archival documents, I examine how these intermediaries were deliberately designed with distinct socio-legal strategies aimed at shielding climate policy from political and fiscal shocks. Finally, I demonstrate how different socio-legal strategies account for policy survival when the environmental state was under attack by Bolsonaro. I conclude by discussing how such strategies contribute to policy resilience in the face of democratic backsliding, highlighting similar instances of policy insulation attempts in the Global South.
Whose Merit, which Redistribution? Elites, Taxes, and Transfers in Brazil and South Africa [with Graziella Moraes Silva and Matias Lopez]
*Revise and Resubmit
Scholarship finds that elites credit their own success to hard work and attribute poverty to laziness, which allows them to justify inequality and oppose redistribution. These accounts often treat two claims as mirrors: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We argue that these two dimensions of merit constitute different dimensions, with varied implications for redistributive policies, such as taxation or direct transfers, and with different salience depending on national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for which types of redistribution. We find that elites in both countries are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort. Elites that perceive the poor as effortless are also less likely to support transfers to the poor. The two countries diverge in the role of elite merit in shaping support for taxation: in Brazil, perceiving elites as hard-working is associated with rejecting taxation policies, though these perceptions are confounded with ideology; in South Africa, only racial identification explains preferences for taxation policies. We conclude that the relationship between elite’s perceptions of merit and their redistributive preferences are contingent on whose merit is considered, which redistribution is considered, as well as which national repertoires of evaluation are available.
Qualitative Methods and the Digital Era: How computation entangles fieldwork?
*full draft available
Scholars writing about the interface between qualitative and computational methods have rightly focused on machine learning. But computation transforms qualitative fieldwork in quieter ways, through scrapping, parsing, optical character recognition, archiving, and zooming. This paper situates computational methods within a wider digital and argues that they entangle fieldwork spatially (by increasing its geographical reach), temporally (by accelerating research), and epistemically (by influencing what we can now). I show these kinds of entanglement by drawing on my own comparative-historical study of Brazil’s decarbonization capacities, which was conduct within a Ph.D. structured by COVID-19. Before the lockdown, fieldwork relied on direct observation and interviews with environmental fieldworkers and policymakers. During lockdown, computation provided continuity: web scraping, archival digitization, and machine learning substituted travel and extended the field in time and space. After restrictions eased, these computational results were reintroduced into interviews through visualizations that prompted important findings but also highlighted blind spots.
Putting power into boxes: Challenges and advantages of conducting surveys with elites [with Graziella Moraes Silva, Matias Lopez, and Debora Thome]
*full draft available
While elite surveys have a long tradition in the social sciences, scholars have questioned their feasibility and analytical value, citing problems of sampling, access, and the limits of structured questionnaires. Drawing on metadata from over 300 elite samples across more than 60 countries, as well as our own mixed-method research with political, economic, and social elites in Brazil and South Africa, we reassess three recurrent critiques: that probabilistic sampling is ill-suited for elites, that elites are uniformly hard to survey, and that standardized instruments fail to capture elite attitudes. We show that probabilistic sampling can produce high-quality elite samples and defensible population-level estimates, and that structured questionnaires do not merely constrain expression but discipline elite respondents by predefining analytical categories and limiting rhetorical maneuvering. By compelling elites to position themselves within a shared classificatory space, surveys make variation and contradiction within elite worldviews empirically visible. We conclude that methodological choices in elite research should be guided less by assumptions about elites as a special population worthy of special methods than by clearly specified research questions, inferential aims, and substantive interests.
National backlash and the material erosion of the liberal world order: how democratic backsliding defunds the United Nations [with Henrique Sposito]
*writing up; data collection methodology and descriptive findings are available here
Recent scholarship has centered on the relationship between democratic backsliding and the liberal world order. Existing research suggests that, rather than fully withdrawing from, backsliding governments adjust their rhetoric and adopt strategic maneuvers to stall the diffusion of liberal norms within IOs. Yet, we know little about whether these governments also reduce their financial support—beyond the anecdotal case of Trump’s recent defunding. This article examines whether and how democratic backsliding affects IO funding. We employ a mixed-methods design leveraging a dataset covering over 30’000 member-states’ donations to 65 UN organizations from 2013 to 2024. First, using fixed-effects models, we test the relationship between democratic backsliding and states’ financial contributions globally. Across a range of operationalizations and specifications, we find no systematic effect of backsliding even if we account for organizational mandate and timing. In the second step, we conduct comparative case analysis of Brazil and the United States. Diff-in-diff estimates show that both the Trump (2017–2020) and Bolsonaro (2019–2023) administrations restructured UN funding, but in selective ways: the United States reduced voluntary contributions to normative agencies such as UN Women, while Brazil redirected funds toward technical programs. We complement these findings with documentary evidence illustrating how each administration justified or implemented these changes. Our results suggest that backsliding governments do not necessarily disengage from the UN system but recalibrate their financial commitments in ways that reflect selective resistance.
Easy and Hard Decarbonization: The (Im)possibility of Ecological Modernization in the Global South
*data analysis phase
Ecological modernization theories foresee a positive relationship between economic growth and environmental protection, but evidence of such possibility remains scant in the age of the climate breakdown. A potential exception regularly put forth by environmentalists is Brazil: from 2004 to 2012, the country drastically reduced deforestation while increasing GDP. I argue the Brazilian case is not an example of ecological modernization: greening and growing coincided but are not causally linked. Rather, I demonstrate how negative environmental externalities were displaced in time and space. Building on the distinction between easy and hard redistribution, I propose a similar distinction for decarbonization. Expansions of the environmental state occur when the trade-off between greening and growth is small enough to generate supporting policy coalitions that do not draw attention from opposition (easy decarbonization). When the trade-off hardens, business elites block CO2 (hard decarbonization). I argue that Brazil in specific and many other Global South countries more generally are currently in a phase of hard protection. I discuss this framework considering other experiences, highlighting the conditions under which ecological modernization remains possible—or foreclosed—in the region.