Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the various ways in which the contradiction between capital expansion and conservation was concealed over time in Brazil, as well as the consequences of these perspectives for deforestation in the world's most biodiverse country.

Presentation long abstract

We have previously explored the central role that environmental governance of conservation plays in the rise and fall of authoritarianism (Coats and Sandroni 2023, Deutsch et al, 2025). During the golden period of neoliberal conservation governance - roughly from the late 2000’s till the mid 2010’s - the basic contradiction between conservation (neo)extrativist expansion was done by casting environmental protection as a growth project alongside extractivism, to harness the economic value of conserved nature (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008; Fletcher et al. 2019). The rise of post-truth politics changed this scenario, accepting the failure of the neoliberal technocratic consensus of areas to protect and areas to expand, toward legitimating unmitigated extractive capitalist growth through a renewed obfuscation of the very existence of the contradiction itself. This paper analyzes the different ways in which the contradiction was concealed over time in Brazil and some consequences of those perspectives for deforestation in the most biodiverse country in the world. We first discuss the first working party’s administration during Latin America’s “pink tyde” period, based in a neoextractivist economic model. Following, we discuss the strong rearrangement in the power knowledge struggles around conservation during the authoritarian period of 2018 to 2022. Finally we make an initial analysis of the current scenario of Brazilian environmental governance that seeks to recover the neoliberal consensus amidst the blatant presence of the contradictions and the relative incorporation of radical demands for a just ecological transition.