Capacity-Building, Dismantling Strategies, and Resistance Tactics in Brazilian Environmental Agencies: Changes in Ibama’s Authority and Nodality Tools from 2004 to 2022

This chapter investigates the dynamics between illiberal populists and tenured bureaucrats in contexts of democratic backsliding by turning to the case of Ibama, a Brazilian environmental agency that plays a prominent role in inspecting operations against illegal deforestation in the Amazon. Bridging together concepts traditionally employed in studies on state capacity with insights from research on policy dismantling, the in-depth case study analyzed in this chapter draws on 44 semi-structured interviews and systematic documental analysis covering an 18-year time span. It argues that a central strategy employed by the illiberal populist government of Jair Bolsonaro to subvert existing anti-deforestation policies was the neutralization of Ibama’s “doctrine of deterrence,” a set of institutional guidelines aimed at increasing the perception of risk by deforesters that was consolidated over a 14-year process of incremental capacity-building. Ibama’s tenured staff reacted to dismantling by adopting different tactics of resistance, namely low profiling; strengthening associations of civil servants; mobilizing informal alliances; and opening up channels for whistleblowing. These tactics, however, turned out to be more damage reducers than game changers per se, especially due to how Bolsonaro’s interferences in environmental policy processes were solidly backed by the following two contextual factors of Brazil’s institutional setting: the enduring overrepresentation of the rural caucus in the Legislative; and the absence of minimum legal criteria for the fulfillment of top-level positions within the federal bureaucracy.