Corporate lobbying, agribusiness, and climate change politics in Brazil's bioenergy transition

Lobbying has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for decades and is widely recognized as a long-standing and legitimate component of democratic governance and the policymaking process. Neither inherently good nor bad, the democratic value of lobbying depends on its transparency, accountability, and alignment with the public interest. When it is opaque or unaccountable, lobbying raises serious concerns about power asymmetries, undue influence, issues of justice, and the erosion of the public interest. This article examines the political activity of bioenergy companies in Brazil, a key player in global debates on the low-carbon energy transition. For this purpose, we first develop an analytical framework based on a review of the scientific literature on lobbying and corporate political activity (CPA) from 1970 to April 2025. This framework includes four dimensions: strategic-instrumental, critical, normative-ethical, and political corporate social responsibility- and governance-oriented perspectives. Using this framework, we analyze how Brazilian bioenergy companies engage in political dynamics by examining sustainability reports, corporate documents, media articles, government documents, and NGO publications from 2007 to 2020. For data analysis, we apply topic modeling and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, specifically BERTopic and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Our findings reveal that these companies actively coordinate their political engagement, particularly through industry associations such as the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA), and benefit from the support of the Parliamentary Agribusiness Group, given their agribusiness-oriented profile and shared regulatory interests. Their political strategies are embedded in powerful socio-technical imaginaries and discourses that frame bioenergy as a solution to climate change, energy security, and rural development. However, these narratives remain contested, particularly regarding socio-environmental concerns. This study contributes to understanding corporate lobbying in sustainability transitions by showing that lobbying is a key part of the political process, which both shapes and is shaped by disputes over energy futures.