Livio Silva-Muller (Harvard Academy Scholar)

"Environmental State-Building in the Amazon Rainforest and the Origins of Global Climate Finance"

This talk covers the historical origins of environmental institutions in the Brazilian Amazon and how they informed climate finance models that later became widespread. The critical juncture is 1988: when pictures of the burning rainforest reached global headlines, a series of events led the 1992 Earth Summit to be held in Rio de Janeiro. Out of that moment, Brazilian and international bureaucrats, scientists, and lawyers began building a new set funding schemes to protect the Amazon — from the country's first national environment fund to multiple mechanisms connected to multilateral organizations and global philanthropy. Relying on archival work, in-depth interviews, and a novel data set on historical climate finance in the Amazon, I trace how these early experiments in environmental state-building shaped the legal and financial designs that became prevalent in climate finance today; and why some of them proved durable enough to survive later attempts to dismantle them. Conceptually, the talk speaks to debates in political-historical, transnational, and legal sociologies.