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Presentation short abstract

The article explores the justification of the Brazilian green macrofinancial regime. Despite high ambition, Brazil's subordinated financialization reproduces its semiperipheral position in the world economy by weakening the state's capacity for intervention in the social-ecological transformation.

Presentation long abstract

This contribution article analyses how Brazilian climate policies are shaped by its state capacity for intervention, analyzing green macrofinancial regimes, i.e. configurations of monetary, fiscal and financial institutions. It explores the justification of the Brazilian green macrofinancial regime in climate policy documents by employing critical discourse analysis of practical argumentation (CDAPA). CDAPA allows to show how climate policy documents handle contradictions by producing consensus under given structural constraints – in this case global financial structures.

Green macrofinancial regimes are distinguished along two dimensions: public spending and discipline over private capital. This results in four types of green macrofinancial regime: carbon shock therapy (low public spending + high (market) discipline), weak derisking (low spending + low (state) discipline), robust derisking (high public spending + low (state) discipline) and the big green state (high public spending + high (state) discipline). More interventionist regimes can selectively draw on instruments from less interventionist ones.

Despite more ambitious goals (green neo-industrialization, well-being for all) and values (climate justice, human dignity, indigenous knowledge) Brazil's state managers stop short of disciplining private capital and instead mainly implement (robust and weak) derisking. This is explained by Brazil’s financially subordinated position that restricts its state intervention capacity and thus its efficacy to rapidly decarbonize in a socially equitable way. The discourse tries to handle this contradiction by justifying an ecomodernist climate policy (green growth). While ambition for green industrialization is expressed, financial subordination structurally pushes Brazil back into a technologically updated version of the old agricultural-extractivist economic model.