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The Politics of Sustainable Development Environmental Policy Making in Four Brazilian States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Barry Ames
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Margaret E. Keck
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University

Extract

The term sustainable development has become a catch phrase of the 1990s, a handy slogan for politicians, bureaucrats, environmental activists, multinational aid officials, and even business leaders. Implementing sustainable development policy, however, is no mere technical problem. Indeed, environmental policy making is classically political: a competition among multiple interests with differing goals, resources, tactics, information, and time horizons. Who “sustains” what, for whom, why, and how? These questions underpin any analysis of the politics of environmental policy.

Scholars have paid little attention to the political side of environmental policy making in developing countries. Although environmental policy making is often understood as a case of “diffusion,” in which ideas flowed from Western Europe and the United States to the developing world, the acceptance of new ideas is always mediated by local institutions and cultures (Sikkink, 1991). Furthermore, as international linkages have come to involve more and more actors outside foreign ministries, the form of diffusion differs from classic examples like social security policy (Collier and Messick, 1975).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1997

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Footnotes

*

For research contributing to this article, Margaret E. Keck received financial assistance from the Howard Heinz Endowment (Center for Latin American Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Research Grant on Current Latin American Issues), the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies (with funds provided by the Ford Foundation), and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Barry Ames received financial assistance from Washington University, St. Louis; and the University of Pittsburgh. This research began as a consulting project for the World Bank, which naturally bears no responsibility for any statements in this article.

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