The International and Local Politics of the Rural Environmental Registry: Brazil's Green Currency

Abstract

Since the 2000s, rural elites have engaged in ‘greening’ the Amazon extractive frontier. Private and state-led initiatives have consolidated the agro-industrial system by incentivizing compliance and effectively legalizing deforestation. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural — CAR) is fundamental to ‘sustainable producer’ initiatives and international and local carbon markets. Since its emergence at the end of the 1990s, it has been funded and promoted by European countries and the World Bank through the G7 Pilot Programme for the Conservation of Brazilian Rainforests and the Amazon Fund. This analysis draws on a critical political economy approach and several years of multi-site interviews, participant observation and archival research to illuminate how donor and recipient agencies have sustained territorial and georeferencing technologies as an international state project to enable the green economy, despite political shifts and the inherent contradictions of this instrument. The article shows how ecological modernization technologies enable the ‘greening’ of agro-industry expansion while exacerbating land conflicts and marginalizing Indigenous and traditional peoples’ collective land rights.