St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

DOI 10.1007/s12116-011-9092-1

The Politics of Environmental Licensing: Energy

Projects of the Past and Future in Brazil

Kathryn Hochstetler

Published online: 5 October 2011

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract How do societies make complex choices about concrete energy

alternatives? Can citizens play effective roles in balancing risks and benefits? This
article proposes that energy choices can be best understood as the result of a balance
of power between state-society coalitions that aim to either block or enable the
project. Environmental licensing and financing decisions are two decision points
where the coalitions face off—and where energy projects go forward or are stopped.
The article demonstrates that environmental licensing has become an unexpectedly
stringent process in Brazil, with both formal opportunities and historic practices
increasing the influence of blocking coalitions. Yet case studies of the Belo Monte
hydroelectric dam and massive new petroleum reserves in the “pre-salt” region show
that blocking coalitions emerge inconsistently in the same institutional context,
illustrating the hazards of relying on public mobilization for addressing certain kinds
of risk situations. An “anticipatory state” may also pre-empt mobilization by
proactively responding to the concerns blocking coalitions are likely to raise.

Keywords Brazil . Energy politics . Environmental licensing . Citizen participation

While millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of
2010, dilemmas that often go unnoticed became headlines. How are choices made
about the evident risks of energy production? How are costs balanced against the
benefits of the energy produced? Who acquires risks, and who is likely to benefit?
Perhaps most important, who should participate in this balancing exercise, and how?
What roles can citizens effectively play?
This article approaches those questions with a case study of Brazil. As the
Brazilian state anticipates a period of economic growth, the Ministry of Mines and
Energy has completed its decadal plan for expanding Brazil’s energy sources
accordingly (Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010). The current energy matrix is

K. Hochstetler (*)
Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
e-mail: hochstet@uwaterloo.ca
350 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

unusually devoted to renewable fuels, and it plans to further expand hydroelectric power
in the Amazon region. The Ministry also proposes quick development of potentially
huge off-shore petroleum reserves that are four times as deep as the ill-fated BP well.
Non-state actors will try to influence implementation of the plans, with environ-
mentalists and private economic actors often on opposite sides—each with some state
allies. After an introduction to the participants and the broader lines of energy conflict
in Brazil, I examine the way they appear in the environmental licensing processes
around two sites: the hydroelectric plant known as Belo Monte and the new oil wells
to be drilled off-shore from the famous beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil presents some of the typical challenges of a developing economy making
energy choices. It has abundant natural resources that form an important
environmental patrimony. At the same time, many Brazilians are poor, so economic
growth is a socio-political imperative and the energy sector literally fuels that. Yet its
energy choices will not automatically benefit its poorest citizens, and there is some
history of these groups paying the heaviest costs in dislocation and contamination
(Hochstetler and Keck 2007). Finally, Brazil is increasingly a regional power, whose
decisions set examples for its neighbors and other emerging powers. Thus processes
and dilemmas that appear in Brazil are likely to be relevant to other parts of the
developing world.
The analytical framework proposed sees energy choices as the outcomes of
political struggles between an enabling coalition that stresses the benefits of
particular energy options for society and a blocking coalition that warns about their
risks while identifying probable losers. A series of institutions and regulations create
the broader setting of their struggle, establishing the tools available to each for
influence. The environmental licensing process is a key decision moment when
specific projects take shape, and so gains particular attention here. While this
framework helps to make sense of how energy risks and benefits are balanced in the
two cases, it cannot account for an important variation in them: there is no blocking
coalition for the petroleum development. In the conclusion, I examine the citizen
mobilizations that take place in order to better understand the conditions of their
emergence. I also return to the question of what citizens’ participation can bring to
energy and development decisions—and the potential consequences of their absence.

Varieties and Purposes of Citizen Participation

The idea that citizens should take active part in development initiatives is now
standard thinking in all but the most authoritarian of regimes. In energy policy-
making, citizens potentially appear as consumers, workers, resident communities,
experts, entrepreneurs, advocates, and implementers and monitors. I focus on
citizens’ interactions with the administrative state—the bureaucratic agencies that
make, regulate, and implement energy project choices—where even democracies
often have more tenuous and indirect citizen control (Evans 2005; McCool 1998). I
build on the work of Hochstetler and Keck (2007) who suggest that citizens often
attempt to influence policies by participating in broad coalitions that cross the state-
society boundary and can be characterized as generally oriented toward blocking or
enabling particular policy outcomes.
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 351

Blocking coalitions are frequently put together in conditions of perceived threat,

with participants using protests and elite allies to try to stop a policy decision or its
implementation (Hochstetler and Keck 2007: 19). In the energy policy context, these
coalitions warn about the risks and hazards of specific energy options, and identify
likely losers. Much of the social science literature on energy politics focuses on
blocking coalitions (e.g., Carvalho 2006; Conca 2006; Khagram 2004; McCormick
2009; Rothman 2001). Energy projects do not just happen, however, and
implemented projects reflect the active work of what Hochstetler and Keck call
enabling coalitions (2007: 20), where state and society work together in cooperative
arrangements that seek consensus. These activities often grow out of routine
coordination and rarely grab the headlines. Synergistic enabling coalitions tend to
stress the potential benefits that can accrue to participants and society as a whole,
deemphasizing risks and hazards.
I argue that the balance between blocking and enabling coalitions is settled at key
decision points that either permit a particular energy project to go forward or stop it.
This article focuses on one of them, the environmental licensing process. It is now a
central decision point in Brazil (World Bank 2008), although it is not always as
important elsewhere and was not in Brazil historically. Ibama, the environmental
licensing agency within the Ministry of the Environment, subnational licensing
agencies, and the courts are key actors here. The blocking coalition is often closely
associated with this decision point and the state institutions involved in it.
Participants in the enabling coalition tend to be closer to a second decision point,
the acquisition of project finance. Large, expensive energy projects that pay off only
over a long time horizon have special financing needs. National and international
public and private lenders have historically assessed the financial viability of Brazil’s
energy projects and are now sometimes joined by private firms and stock market
investors. While the financial decision point is a secondary analytical focus here, it
intersects in important ways with environmental licensing and is central to the case
studies.
One set of questions I take up here, then, is the empirical one of how citizens play
blocking and enabling roles in two Brazilian energy case studies. The blocking/
enabling distinction also allows new insight into a larger debate about citizens’
participation in policy-making, which asks about what their participation might bring
to the process of making national choices about the risks and benefits of different
development choices. Here, previous research suggests several major interpretations.
At the most basic level, such participation might be seen as generating consent for
government policies among even losing sides. It is a classically liberal position that
argues that the procedural guarantee of participation “reduces transaction costs,
improves access to local information, and increases stakeholder commitment to
(‘ownership of’) policies” (Abers and Keck 2009: 294; see also Payne 1995). A
more directly instrumental version of this argument is Kirchoff’s observation about
environmental licensing that “… while a participatory approach may extend the time
needed during the initial stages of analysis and planning, such investment is
normally ‘returned’ later in the process by avoiding or minimizing conflict”
(Kirchoff 2006: 4). This is an enabling vision of citizen participation.
A second set of arguments comes from theorists of deliberative democracy, who
value participatory discussions in hopes that “reasoned argument and public
352 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

reflection” (Meadowcroft 2004: 184) will be transformative of preferences.

Deliberation allows participants to learn each other’s points of view and build
outcomes that reflect collective long-term interests rather than simply aggregating
preferences and finding which dominate numerically, as elections do (Dryzek 1997).
In assuming that participation can generate consensual resolutions through dialog,
this is again an enabling vision.
Another viewpoint on participation is that it should serve to redress the persistent
inequalities that permeate most economic and political decision making. Policy
studies have observed that bureaucracies are often subject to capture by actors in
tight policy subsystems who shape state policies to their own, rather than broad
societal, benefit (McCool 1998). The justice perspective has a more confrontational
view of what participation is likely to bring to policy debates, embracing “political
contention as a manifestation of democracy in action” (Devlin and Yap 2008: 18).
Since excluded voices are likely to challenge elite preferences, including them is
likely to heighten conflict before it results in resolution (if it does). The justice
perspective is often invoked by and about blocking coalitions, for whom such
arguments help to justify their adversarial quality.
Finally, Abers and Keck have suggested another outcome of participation that has
less to do with immediate decision making than with how the administrative state
behaves in the longer term. Their arguments link participation to longer-term
implications for state behavior through the observation “that having to explain itself
and knowing it is going to be monitored changes how governments” act (Abers and
Keck 2009: 7). As governments work with citizens in varying modes of
participation, they may begin to proactively anticipate citizen reaction.

The Brazilian Energy Matrix: An Overview of Energy Needs and Supplies

In 2009, the Brazilian energy matrix drew an astonishing 47.3% of its supply from
non-fossil fuel sources: hydroelectric and alternative electricity (15.3%), sugar cane
products (18.1%), and wood and charcoal (13.9%). Petroleum derivatives, at 37.8%
of total energy, dominated the non-renewables and were the single biggest fuel
source (Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010). This unusual energy matrix was not
intentional so much as the product of historical choices laid down—literally—in
integrated energy grids. Scarce coal and abundant hydroelectric sources near early
cities led to hydroelectric power becoming Brazil’s “incumbent fuel,” one that is
particularly hard to displace since the operating costs for hydro are low once the
plant is built (Leite 2009: 4–5; Victor and Heller 2007: 12–13). Similarly, Brazilians
experimented with using sugar cane as a fuel in the 1930s when the international
sugar market was weak. Energy nationalism in the 1970s led to a return to ethanol
and also spurred investments that enabled Brazil to extract oil from its continental
shelf, reaching petroleum self-sufficiency in 2005 (Leite 2009).
This baseline forms a backdrop for current decision making about the energy
development Brazil should support. The Energy Research Company (EPE) within
the Ministry of Mines and Environment annually drafts a 10-year energy expansion
plan. The 2010 plan aims to support anticipated domestic economic growth of 5.1%
annually (Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010). Rising domestic electricity needs are
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 353

to be met exclusively with renewable sources: hydroelectric plants are to produce

70% of the installed new capacity while alternative energy sources will add the rest.
Domestic vehicles will consume much of a planned increase in ethanol production.
Petroleum production is expected to expand 2.5 times, but the agency anticipates
most of that increase will be exported. An unexpectedly stringent new climate
change law in 2010 would make building new thermoelectric plants to burn the
petroleum for electricity at home harder (Viola 2010). If all of EPE’s expectations
are met, the overall matrix should remain much the same as it is today. The next
sections show just how far EPE and the Ministry of Mines and Energy are from
being able to close the debate on energy alternatives, however.

The Brazilian Energy Matrix: Actors, Conflicts, and Coalitions

Energy in Brazil has become one of the country’s most contentious political
domains, with many conflicts over national development models deflected here.1
The simplest view of Brazilian energy politics would see it as a classic struggle
between economic development and environmental protection. That is, there is an
enabling coalition oriented around the Ministry of Mines and Energy and private
industry that is generally ready to move ahead with energy projects while a blocking
coalition, centered on socio-environmental activists and their allies in the Ministry of
the Environment and the judiciary, is less ready to approve them. Yet neither side
would accept the simplest view, as each believes it is balancing both sets of
concerns. The process of environmental licensing is the legally mandated time where
their struggle is distilled into a single outcome—some part of the energy matrix is
built in a particular way, or is not built—and so has come to be the fulcrum of
Brazilian development debates.
While the energy-building enabling coalition includes both state and market
actors, its exact shape has been regularly reformulated by broader debates about the
appropriate roles of public and private actors. The energy sector lends itself to long-
term and large-scale planning, as new supplies emerge primarily through bulky new
resource extraction projects, power plants, and distribution systems. As the twentieth
century state acquired greater responsibility for ensuring national economic well-being,
it took on energy planning and investments. Then Britain’s Thatcher government began
an ideologically framed return to greater market control of energy in the 1980s, and
countries around the world followed suit. Yet despite a generation of privatization, the
result is often a hybrid rather than the textbook market model (Victor and Heller 2007).
In Brazil, key legislation in the 1930s separated land ownership from ownership
of water and minerals, reserving the latter for the state to directly manage or offer in
concessions. Over the next decades, a series of public enterprises were created to
carry out these roles, with Petrobras (for petroleum) and Eletrobras (for electricity) in

1
This paper is constructed using primarily publicly available sources. My analysis also draws on
interviews with five civil society representatives and additional individuals who currently or formerly
worked in government agencies engaged in the licensing process (two), other environmental roles (two),
and the Ministry of Mines and Energy (two). The interviews took place in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro in
June 2009 and July 2010. Because of the sensitivity of some of the interview materials, interviewees are
not identified.
354 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

the lead (Leite 2009). These state agencies were partially privatized in the 1990s.
Privatization was highly controversial and difficult in Brazil, with key provisions
like allowing foreign participation requiring the super-majorities of constitutional
amendments. The military was called in to end anti-privatization strikes among
Petrobras’s workers in 1995. In a compromise, the federal state retains controlling
ownership, Petrobras’s workers were allowed to acquire shares at favorable prices,
and other shares are publicly traded (de Almeida and Moya 1997). Petrobras’ legal
monopoly on the oil and gas sector passed to a new National Petroleum Agency
(ANP), which oversees auctions of new contracts to all bidders, including Petrobras.
In the electricity sector, privatization was largely limited to the distribution
companies, which had been controlled by the states. While the federal government
intended to privatize its own generation plants, political and economic crises
prevented that (de Oliveira 2007). Eletrobras quit playing its coordination and
planning roles in the 1990s, but those functions were not formally privatized, and no
one did them for a time.
Even with partial ownership changes, control of the energy sector was ultimately
retained by the state. Plans for the new oil fields, discussed below, appear likely to
formally increase state control of that sector again. The Ministry of Mines and
Energy took back coordination roles through its sub-agencies, especially after under-
investment in the electricity sector led to widespread blackouts in 2001. After 1998,
a new National System Operator (ONS) directs plants in a national grid to generate
and distribute electricity, starting with the lowest cost operators, which are usually
hydroelectric plants (de Oliveira 2007: 54–57). While the ONS coordinates everyday
supply, the EPE and others in the Ministry of Mines and Energy plan long-term
supply (e.g., Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010). The National Electric Power
Agency, also under MME but independent, auctions and oversees power concessions
as well as setting tariffs. State rule-making and setting of tariffs mean that it has
almost as much influence over public utilities as before privatization. The Brazilian
National Development Bank (BNDES) and public pension funds have financed
much energy development after privatization common adding public financial
carrots (World Bank 2008).
Private actors can own electricity distribution companies or shares of Petrobras
and can bid to take part in energy concessions. Private construction companies build
much of the physical infrastructure on contract, and domestic content requirements
provide markets for many small and medium-sized firms. Over 50 years, the most
common argument for private participation is that it can provide the necessary
investment capital that has always been in short supply in Brazil (Stallings and
Studart 2006). Between state agencies leading bidding consortia and public funding
for many initiatives, this is less true than imagined, but private capital has
contributed about $60 billion (World Bank 2008: 15). Private capital investments
are low, with one reason being that firms consider Brazil’s regulatory risk—the
possibility that laws and regulations might change or be applied in ways that affect
profitability—to be comparatively high. The unpredictability and length of the
environmental licensing process are part of this (ibid: 13).
As private companies bid on contracts or participate in state auctions for
concessions, they have obvious conflicts of interests with the state, with each side
wanting a larger share of the revenues generated (de Oliveira 2007). Yet both public
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 355

and private actors share substantial interests in that neither can meet its aims without
the energy project being built. A small number of energy and construction firms
earns many of these concessions, and they have done business with each other and
the state for decades. Thus, they ultimately stand together against a coalition that is
much more skeptical of the value of particular energy initiatives. Both public and
private actors in the pro-building coalition would agree that the sustainable
development principle requires attention to development as well as sustainability,
along with the opportunity costs of not building particular projects (Ministério de
Minas e Energia 2010: 332; World Bank 2008).
On the other side, a blocking coalition frequently appears. This coalition forms
loosely coordinated networks of activists, with the same actors often reappearing
(Hochstetler and Keck 2007: 19–21). Environmental activists in both state and
society take part, and often cross sides between the two. An array of more socially
oriented organizations—the atingidos or affected groups, landless movements,
indigenous communities, unions—may also join in, giving the coalitions their
characteristic “socio-environmental” cast, where activists insist that human–human
relations must be addressed in order to solve environmental problems (ibid: 13).
International networks often support these efforts as well (Conca 2006; Keck and
Sikkink 1998; Khagram 2004). The Ministry of Environment has been open to
citizens, and almost all agency heads have had personal histories of environmental
research and/or activism (Hochstetler and Keck 2007: 20, 202–204).
Despite cooperation on overarching aims, energy projects have also often pitted
activists against the environmental agencies, and especially their environmental
licensing arms. Here, the alliance is built with a different part of the state, the very
active Ministério Público (MP, public prosecutor) that can take any public or private
actor to task for working against “collective interests.” Prosecutors in the MP may
initiate their own investigations of possible legal infractions, and they are obligated
to investigate the accusations of others. They may take complaints to the courts or
insist on Voluntary Conduct Adjustment agreements (McAllister 2008). In a division
of labor, many environmental organizations prefer to simply bring complaints to the
MP, and allow it to use its legal expertise and resources to resolve the issue
(Hochstetler and Keck 2007: 53–55). Since the MPs role was consolidated in the
1988 constitution, it has become a daily part of enforcement. To give an idea of the
scale of its activity, São Paulo’s state MP investigated 36,859 cases from 1984 to
2004. Most of these were resolved without litigation, but the threat of a court case
always loomed and an annual average of 204 complaints ended up there (McAllister
2008: 98–99). In blocking coalitions, the MP is a key partner of socio-environmental
activists.
Participants in the anti-building coalition bring many motivations to their
alliances. Some participate out of opposition to direct costs that will be imposed
on them as residents or workers in a project area. Others include an emerging
environmental justice movement in Brazil that is trying to organize resources and
expertise so that damaging projects are not moved to less-organized areas
(Hochstetler and Keck 2007: 219–221). They believe that very few large energy
projects have compensations that warrant their social and/or environmental costs. Where
the pro-building coalition notes an ever-rising demand for energy it wants to meet, this
coalition asks whether those uses—for products like aluminum for export—really
356 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

represent good quality growth, especially when it comes with high socio-
environmental costs (Fearnside 2006). Thus, both coalitions vary internally, but they
tend to be able to unify on whether to build particular projects.

Environmental Licensing: Fulcrum of Contention

The two coalitions just described directly confront each other during the process of
environmental licensing, designed to include both. Participants in the enabling
coalition are responsible for having the environmental assessments prepared, and
formally interact with the licensing agency until there is a final licensing decision.
Any blocking coalition gains entry through the public consultation process and
through its ability to challenge the license in court. While environmental impact
assessment generally can be seen as “contentious politics” (Devlin and Yap 2008),
the Brazilian version is especially conflictual. This is due to the comparatively
extensive openings it provides, by design and practice, to blocking coalitions.
First, Brazil explicitly adds social considerations to the criteria evaluated in
environmental licensing. The original 1986 licensing regulation (Conama 001/86)
defined environmental impact as including any alterations in the environment that
affect “the health, security and well-being of the population” or “social and
economic activities.” As the licensing process has been used, compensation for
socioeconomic impacts like resettlement and support for communities has come to
dominate licensing costs for hydroelectric plants. They total $94/kW installed versus
just $19/kW installed for physical environmental impact mitigation (World Bank
2008: 26). These together average 12% of total project costs for hydroelectric
projects (ibid: 10). The explicit inclusion of social concerns gives environmentalists
natural allies among a broad set of social organizations, strengthening their ability to
contest particular projects. There are no standard compensation rules, so they are
refought for many projects (ibid: 20), also spurring mobilization.
Brazil’s licensing process requires a report of the environmental impact
assessment to be written in accessible language and distributed to the population.
Public audiences are not mandatory, but can be requested. Such provisions are more
common, but Brazil’s use of them is expansive. As licensing became more
contentious, Ibama, the agency under the Ministry of Environment which manages
licensing, created a searchable online database with all documents related to
licensing. The intention is to locate areas of contestation before they become claims
in court. The website is easy to use—simply typing “Belo Monte” on the search
screen pulls up a list of the 67 documents cataloged by Ibama in licensing that
hydroelectric plant from 2006 to 2011.2 Unlike in more secretive political systems,
then, civil society groups have a great deal of access to the information and
procedures licensing agencies use in approving projects, which they can use in
contesting particular licenses.
Contention is also higher in Brazil because of the role of the Ministério Público,
which often challenges environmental assessments and licenses. Environmental

2
http://www.ibama.gov.br/licenciamento/index.php. Choose “consulta,” then “empreendimentos,” and
type Belo Monte to see the documents.
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 357

impact assessments are coordinated by the company undertaking the project then
evaluated by the relevant environmental agency. The assessments vary a good deal
in quality, as does the oversight (Empresa de Pesquisa Energética 2006; World Bank
2008). Many advance even when poorly done, and political appointees sometimes
grant licenses when technical staff disagree. There is, however, the possibility for
extensive scrutiny, requests for modifications, and even refusals to allow the project
to go forward. The blocking coalition monitors this process and may activate the MP,
which most often raises procedural concerns, such as whether appropriate public
audiences have been held or whether the right level of agency (state or federal) gave
the approval. It also raises more substantive questions, such as whether the Terms of
Reference properly identify the area of impact. The MP also cites the 1997
Environmental Crimes Law in its cases, which made individuals criminally
responsible for environmental degradation—including someone working in the
area of environmental licensing who knowingly licensed a project that would
degrade the environment. A 2007 law (11.516/07) tried to move this individual
liability to the licensing collectivity (World Bank 2008: 20) but that is being
tested in the courts.
No one involved in environmental licensing in Brazil doubts that it is a
contentious process, and that the frequent intervention of the MP increases the level
of conflict. Those who work personally with licensing feel caught between
implacable opponents. Turnover is high. In 2003, there were just three to four
permanent licensing analysts and about 100 consultants; of about 90 new permanent
analysts added to Ibama’s licensing branch that year, only 15 were left in 2009. The
threat of personal liability continues to haunt especially Ibama’s analysts, as Ibama
licenses the largest and most controversial cases. One former analyst used the word
“terrorism” to describe actions of the MP, then explained that the MP often asks for
data which simply cannot be obtained in a reasonable fashion and that there needs to
be some “control of the controllers” in order for the process to work more smoothly.
Very similar complaints were made in the Ministry of Mines and Energy about
Ibama as well as the MP, and those were echoed in a recent World Bank study of
hydroelectric licensing (World Bank 2008: 20–22; see also McAllister 2008: 143–146).
In the next sections, I examine two recent large-scale energy projects in Brazil, in
an effort to determine how decisions are currently being made and to show how
contention emerges (or not) in energy licensing. They involve the two major energy
types slated for expansion in the next decade, in the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam
and the recently discovered petroleum reserves.

Belo Monte and the Politics of Hydroelectric Dams

The Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam project provides a good view of the
development of energy politics in Brazil over time. First proposed in studies that
began in military-era 1975, the Belo Monte project has been launched and blocked a
number of times. In 2011, it is under construction. This case study involves Brazil’s
incumbent fuel, hydroelectric power, and shows the two coalitions in nearly classic
poses. The long history of contestation consisted of two stages, one in the 1980s that
reflected the “boomerang” politics of local–global advocacy coalitions (Keck and
358 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

Sikkink 1998) and one in the 2000s that shows all the complex contentiousness of
current licensing-oriented debates about development projects.
The Belo Monte dam project dates back to the big dam era of Brazilian
development—an average of 98 big dams were built per decade in the 1950s–1970s
(Khagram 2004: 142). Massive public borrowing from mostly foreign sources
financed these dams (Khagram 2004). The first version of Belo Monte (called
Kararaô) was among the largest of 47 sites along the Xingu River in Eletrobras’
planning studies in 1975–1979 (Khagram 2004: 144). In the mid-1980s, Eletrobras
asked the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank to help provide the
$10–20 billion needed to build the Xingu River dams. Its timing was a little late. Just
a short list of relevant changes were the 1980s’ debt crisis that dried up easy
borrowing, the introduction of environmental licensing in 1986, a new constitution
in 1988 that required special Congressional approval for projects on indigenous
lands, and the generally increased public scrutiny that came with the return to
democracy in 1985 (Hochstetler and Keck 2007).
The coalition against building the Kararaô Dam could draw on mobilizational
experiences that were becoming common in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1980s.
International actors—Oxfam, Environmental Defense Fund, and others—were
seeking ways to convince the multilateral development banks to consider socio-
environmental impacts of their projects (Conca 2006; Keck and Sikkink 1998;
Khagram 2004). They did so by forming partnerships with locally affected peoples.
Indigenous peoples gave striking testimonies against the Brazilian government’s
plan, citing its effects on the forest and their lives. Images of a Kaiapó woman
touching her knife to the face of an Eletrobras spokesman were widely published
(Carvalho 2006; Conca 2006; Fearnside 2006). The World Bank pulled out as
Eletronorte was preparing its first environmental study, and others declined to fund the
project. Observers agree that the Brazilian government put the project aside because of
the lack of funding (Carvalho 2006; Khagram 2004; Rothman 2001)—but the funding
was not available in part because of the transnational blocking coalition.
The 1990s marked something of a holding pattern, with “a de facto moratorium
on building large dams” (Rothman 2001: 317). A fiscal crisis in the state blocked
public borrowing. Multiple actors underwent significant changes: privatization in the
electricity sector, consolidation of the licensing process, and the greater institution-
alization of environmentalists’ participation. The Ministério Público emerged as an
important actor. Affected groups met nationally for the first time in 1989, and
formed a nationwide movement of people affected by dams (Movimento dos
Atingidos por Barragens (MAB)). MAB is not “strictly ‘anti-dam’, framing its
activities in terms of justice for dam-affected peoples, a voice for local communities,
and comprehensive assessment of dam impacts and alternatives” (Conca 2006: 292).
If a dam is going forward, it tries to negotiate the best settlement possible.
In 1998, Eletrobras revised the Kararaô plans by shrinking the size of the reservoir by
two thirds, and instead planning a run-of-river hydroelectric plant using new artificial
canals. The new version was called Belo Monte. Where the previous dam had much of
its local impact from flooding, the new version affects the river most through what it
dries up, as water is deflected from the existing “great bend” of the river into the new
canals, leaving the great bend and downstream areas much drier (Fearnside 2006).
Eletrobras hired a local company in 2001 to prepare the environmental impact
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 359

assessment, and the battle began. The year itself set the scene for open discussion
about energy, as one of the worst droughts in memory brought widespread blackouts.
MAB and local activists coordinated actions around the country, from blocking
worksites to protests outside the state governor’s office and the Rio office of one of
the builders to a seminar on the need for a new energy model. A local anti-Belo
Monte activist was assassinated in August, and protesters faced rubber bullets and
beatings (Conca 2006: 291–292; McCormick 2009:148–149). The MP brought cases
challenging the licensing process and the fact that it had begun without Congressional
approval of building in indigenous territory. These arguments were accepted in 2001,
then suspended on appeal, then reinstated in 2002 (Carvalho 2006).
In a context of concerted opposition from the streets and courts, the various
energy agencies—the National Council on Energy Policy (CNPE), Aneel, and
Eletrobras—closed ranks to push the project through. CNPE formally declared the
project of “strategic interest” in September 2001. The coalition moved forward any
time it was legally allowed, making adjustments to the licensing (e.g., moving the
process from the state level to Ibama in 2003 as the MP had insisted) and the project
itself to overcome legal challenges (Fearnside 2006: 20). During this time, CNPE
also changed its approach to environmental licensing, deciding in 2002 that all
energy projects would need to have the Preliminary Environmental License before
authorization or auction, thus formally bringing socio-environmental considerations
into the process much earlier. In 2004, it created the EPE whose mandate includes
helping companies figure out how to meet the licensing requirements (Empresa de
Pesquisa Energética 2006: 15).
The Belo Monte project had not benefitted from this kind of foresight, but began
to move forward in July, 2005, when Congress passed a decree authorizing
Eletrobras to go forward with the project in indigenous areas, while requiring it to do
a full anthropological study of its impact (Carvalho 2006). The MP submitted a
challenge at the instigation of NGOs at the end of 2005, but it was rejected. In
February 2006, the licensing process formally began and continued through 2011,
with regular reports posted on the Ibama website. Action continued in the courts,
with licensing legally stopped and started twice between March 2006 and February
2007, and the Terms of Reference for the environmental impact assessment (EIA)
presented to Eletrobras only in November 2007. Mobilization continued throughout
this period, but accelerated after the studies were completed in July of 2008 and
presented to Ibama for technical evaluation. Notably, consultation with local
communities began only afterwards. At this point, the story becomes divided, with
a technical enabling story, a mobilizational blocking story, and primarily legal
intersection among them.3 The two stories point to opposed conclusions about both
the Belo Monte project and the quality of decision making about it, and legal
decisions tacked back and forth between them. Judges in the local courts
systematically sided with the mobilization version as presented by the MP, only to
be overturned by the federal government’s appeals to the Federal Regional Tribunal.

3
An important set of documents presenting the social movement side of the debates is at http://www.
socioambiental.org/esp/bm/noticias.asp. The Ibama side of the process is available on its own website,
referenced above. Both fill in key parts of the legal story. Documents cited can be found on these websites
unless otherwise noted.
360 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

Injunctions asking for Belo Monte to be stopped were brought, accepted, and
overturned three more times in 2008–2009. The main concerns were again
procedural—lack of competitive bidding and inadequate consultation with local
communities. Ibama continued to work on the EIA during this time, exchanging
technical notes with Eletrobras as the company completed the assessment. They
spent 3 days together in March 2009, with Ibama identifying problems with the
draft. The project received large and small edits, as Eletrobras proposed ways of
handling problems Ibama identified and they set remediation processes and
compensation levels together. With gaps still remaining, Ibama held four public
audiences: 4,417 people registered their attendance, asking 682 questions, and
discussions lasted 30 hours. The Federal Indigenous Agency certified that
indigenous populations had been consulted as required. The final EIA consisted of
some 15,000 pages, and Ibama’s comments on it still ran to 345 pages at the end of
the process. Ibama’s technical staff considered the document still incomplete
(Document 114/09) and listed a number of gaps, including inadequate information
about whether indigenous populations had been properly consulted.
At the end of January, Ibama wrote an internal statement on the EIA, full of
frustration about its task (Parecer 06/2010). The statement notes that the Belo Monte
project is to be installed in a region full of unfinished government projects. The
population is very skeptical that the government will keep its promises this time. The
impact study presented is quite extensive, but incomplete on exactly the questions of
most concern to the local population. The statement ends: “The lack of legal and
technical criteria that express environmental viability, and the diverse interests,
legitimate, but often antagonistic, that find a space for political discussion in the
environmental licensing process, do not allow a technical team to make certain
decisions about the viability of undertakings of this complexity” (345). The initial
environmental license was granted on this ambiguous foundation on 1 February
2010, with 40 serious conditions for advancing to the installation license. Two more
legal challenges were filed by the MP after the license, but overturned just in time
for the 7-min auction of the concession to take place on 20 April 2010.
As initial preparations for construction began, much of the blocking coalition
returned to the historic boomerang strategy. The Xingu Alive Forever Movement,
the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations in the Brazilian Amazon, the Prelacy
of the Roman Catholic Church in the Xingu region, the Indigenous Missionary
Council, the Pará Society for the Defense of Human Rights, Global Justice, and the
Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense joined in a complaint to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American
States (OAS).4 On 1 April 2011, the Commission asked the Brazilian government to
suspend all activities until there could be proper consultation with indigenous
populations, including their access to a social and environment assessment that was
accessible in its length and translated into indigenous languages.
The Brazilian Foreign Ministry declared itself “perplexed” in response, telling the
Commission that it was only relevant in the absence of internal opportunities for

4
Documents cited in this section can be found online at the International Rivers Network website, http://
www.internationalrivers.org/de/latin-america/amazon-basin/xingu-river/belo-monte-dam/suspension-belo-
monte.
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 361

influence, of which there had been many.5 Brazil suspended its annual contribution to
the Commission and the Senate voted a censure against the OAS recommendation. Two
months later, under new leadership, Ibama issued the final construction permit with a
long note about the many changes incorporated for socio-environmental reasons.6
Protests and the eleventh court challenge by the MP greeted the license but
construction has begun.
From the standpoint of the enabling coalition, the Belo Monte Dam fits well with
the understood advantages of the incumbent fuel, hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric
dams are expensive and complicated to site and build but then deliver essentially
free electricity for decades. They fit into the ONS system described above, where a
national system draws on the cheapest available energy. The ONS is designed to
handle Belo Monte’s seasonal variation in output, and planners prefer that to having
plants with high fuel costs (thermoelectric) or very irregular supply (wind and solar)
(Leite 2009). The distance of Belo Monte—4,000 km or so from Brazil’s other giant
hydroelectric dam, Itaipú—makes for potentially complementary variations in water
levels, and the electricity is quickly connected to the national grid through existing
transmission lines.
The MME’s socio-environmental analysis of hydroelectric power finds it
comparatively quite good (Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010: 286–301). For
Belo Monte in particular, the MME notes that it floods just 0.04 km2/MW installed
versus a national average of 0.44, and that no indigenous areas were flooded; the
adjective chosen repeatedly for hydroelectric power is “clean.” By the Ministry’s
calculations, Belo Monte will occupy only 0.5% of the Amazon biome, leaving
plenty of room for forest conservation elsewhere. Other kinds of energy would cost
twice as much.7 Overall, MME finds the Belo Monte plant is a better alternative than
other kinds of energy, and better than when it was first proposed.
The Belo Monte plan deviated from its supporters’ expectations in one important
way: instead of bringing in private capital, the concession auction was held between
two consortia led by state-owned companies. Eletrobras made up nearly 50% of the
winning consortium, and BNDES and public pension funds will fund much of the
work. Large construction and other related companies were expected to bid for
ownership, but instead are preferring to take work contracts, on the grounds that the
government’s auction terms would not allow them to make a profit (Valor
Económico 8 April 2010). Some of the changes made for socio-environmental
reasons reduce the plant’s economic viability, as the run-of-river design means there
will be little electricity generated during dry periods. There are also still ways
(although increasingly unlikely) that the project could be stopped in the licensing
agency or the courts. The second version of the story, from the blockers’ side,
illustrates the nature of the opposition the plant still faces.
The enabling coalition thinks about the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant as part of
a national economy and electricity grid. The part of the opposition farthest from it
has an eminently local view, well expressed by resident Clarisse Gouveia Morais and
5
http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/sala-de-imprensa/notas-a-imprensa/solicitacao-da-comissao-interamericana-
de-direitos-humanos-cidh-da-oea
6
www.ibama.gov.br/archives/15838
7
MME Press Release, 20 April 2010, http://www.mme.gov.br/mme/noticias/destaque_foto/destaque_0082.
html
362 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

recorded by the national NGO, the Social Environmental Institute (ISA): “No money
would repay my life of work, with lots of suffering and sweat. I am not willing to
leave here for other land where I would start again… and therefore I do not want this
hydroelectric plant of death.”8 One of her local leaders, Dom Erwin Krautler, met
twice with Lula personally, who assured him that the dam would not be imposed. A
little after the auction, Lula gave a long interview to the local Diário do Pará,
explaining that the project did not appear overnight and listing the many meetings
that had taken place. He described the $50.1 million/year that local municipalities
would receive, and the $1.87 billion to be invested in social and environmental
compensation, all negotiated through the environmental licensing process.9 Dom
Erwin, however, wrote, “What will become of these families? What is their future?
Where will they go? To this day, government representatives have not answered this
question. It causes me nightmares…”10 The enabling coalition never managed to
turn the large compensation numbers into credible promises that individuals could
embrace.
The difference in worldviews extends to a difference in views of consultation.
National organizations in the blocking coalition believe that local residents might
have supported the project, but were put off by their exclusion from the initial
project development. As a result, the blocking coalition came to insist the
government abandon its plan, and used its participation to that end. On the day of
the auction, indigenous leaders threatened to go to war as a final “communication”
of their opposition since earlier statements were not heard.11 The tumultuous and
inconclusive public consultations were unsatisfactory in themselves for the blocking
coalition. ISA’s summary of the public audiences complains that making thousands
of pages available does not itself provide information, especially for a non-technical
audience. Even those with technical skills lacked time to formulate questions. ISA
characterized the oral discussion as superficial and unsatisfactory,12 and the OAS has
agreed.
One continuity between the story of the 1980s and the current one is that local
resisters can draw on other organizations that are closer to the technical side of the
story, and so able to maneuver in it for them. They no longer can use the lever of
influence through international funding sources since the funding for the dam is now
primarily national. The MP helped replace that tool in the 2000s, providing a reliable
partner for opposition organizations. When consultation processes were inadequate,
it could and did file complaints on those grounds that could stop licensing, at least
temporarily. In the days leading up to the auction, a series of rulings and counter-
rulings left the question of whether the auction would happen open until the last
moment. Afterwards, the MP opened several more cases, including a personal case
against the director of Ibama’s licensing branch who authorized the license.
In addition to opposition organized around local human rights, the blocking
coalition mobilized around a second set of more technical issues related to the
environmental viability of the Belo Monte project itself and large-scale hydropower
8
http://www.socioambiental.org/nsa/detalhe?id=2955
9
http://blog.planalto.gov.br
10
http://www.mabnacional.org.br/noticias/210510_belomonte_xingu.html
11
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/xingu/indigenous-declaration-after-belo-monte-dam-auction
12
http://www.socioambiental.org/nsa/detalhe?id=2955
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 363

in general. Forty experts wrote technical critiques of the EIA, which they presented
in written form to Ibama after the public audiences.13 These were not incorporated
into the EIA, which was completed about 6 weeks later. A member of the blocking
coalition suggested in an interview that their experts’ status as technical analysts was
undermined by their known political commitments. Thus the presence of scientific allies
was not as central in the final outcome as it appeared to be earlier (McCormick 2009).
More broadly, the blocking network is developing a new line of attack that
challenges the assumed environmental virtues of hydropower. The socio-
environmental costs of building large hydroelectric plants have been justified
because subsequent energy production is then clean in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions. Emerging research, much of it done in Brazil, questions whether
hydropower is in fact so benign in the tropics. Philip Fearnside argues measured
greenhouse gas emissions from some of Brazil’s reservoirs are, if anything, worse
than those of electricity plants that run on fossil fuels (e.g., Fearnside 2002). (The
emissions come from decaying vegetation killed when the reservoir is filled and
from new organic matter washed into the reservoir.) A research group led by Luiz
Pinguelli Rosa, former head of Eletrobras, argues in contrast that while there are
more emissions than once assumed, hydroelectric plants continue to be considerably
better than their major alternatives (Rosa et al. 2004). An editorial comment on the
debate in the journal Climatic Change concludes there are complex variations “by
dam, season, and region” and that data and methodological concerns need to be
settled before a final conclusion can be made (Cullenward and Victor 2006: 82).
Opponents and proponents of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant fought each
other to a standstill for 35 years. Especially in the later version, the quality of citizen
participation—particularly for citizens as residents—became central to the project’s
fate. The lower courts rejected the adequacy of consultation multiple times, and were
overturned multiple times, and the environmental license was issued despite a
technical report that said consultation had left out indigenous voices. The blocking
coalition viewed its own participation in terms similar to those of the justice
interpretation of participation, where citizens with a right to be consulted resisted a
project over the injustice of their exclusion. Substantively, they argued they were
being forced to pay the project’s costs for benefits that either accrued elsewhere or
were over-stated. In the end, the enabling coalition’s version of the consultation
process and its cost–benefit analysis predominated, but it was a victory of results—
the project will be built—and did not gain consent. There is evidence of an
increasingly anticipatory state, however, in the decisions by the state to try to register
and respond to potential opposition on socio-environmental grounds earlier in the
process.

The Pre-Salt: Distributing the Benefits and Costs of a New Petroleum Reserve

If hydroelectric power is the century-old incumbent fuel in Brazil, petroleum is an

upstart whose role was not imagined until recently. The Ministry of Mines and

13
http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/américa-latina/os-rios-da-amazônia/rio-xingu-brasil/análise-cr%
C3%ADtica-do-estudo-de-impacto-ambiental-b
364 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

Energy and Petrobras are still investigating the scale of potentially giant reserves of
petroleum that Petrobras discovered in the Santos Bay in 2007, up to 7,000 m deep
including a 2,000-meter layer of salt. Projections are that production from this “pre-salt”
region will be more than half of a total national production of over 5.1 billion barrels of
oil per day in 2019 (Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010: 176). While Belo Monte
provides a retrospective view of energy politics in Brazil, the pre-salt region raises
questions about who has been mobilized around the prospective costs and benefits of a
new energy source. In this case, there is only (so far) an enabling coalition.
The politics of the pre-salt is about who should develop the reserves, how, and
how resulting proceeds should be distributed. There has been very little discussion of
whether they should be developed. The political stances are complex and still
developing, but they are focused on the government’s contention that Brazil needs a
different regulatory regime to reflect the low-risk/high-potential character of
exploration in the pre-salt region. The current regime derives from the privatization
debates of the mid-1990s, which made state-owned Petrobras a state-controlled firm
with extensive publicly traded ownership. It bids against all other firms to develop
Brazil’s oil and gas resources, with winning firms paying royalties on their
concessions. Petrobras is also one of Brazil’s most important multinational firms,
with activities in 27 countries, and will be a major actor in developing the pre-salt
reserve. The exact nature of its role has been at the center of debate among a broad
coalition that favors developing this technically challenging new resource.
The Ministers of Mines and Energy; Finance; Development, Industry, and Trade;
Planning, Budget, and Administration; and the Civil House jointly wrote the first
proposals for how to develop the pre-salt, drafting legislation that was meant to be
fast tracked, spending just 45 days in each house of the National Congress.14 Amid
often-heated debates, most components were finally passed in December 2010, some
17 months later. I focus here on elements that have generated citizen mobilization
and are closely related to the question of how energy risks and benefits are
distributed. In the new legislation, Petrobras is granted contracts outright for
strategic areas within the pre-salt and is guaranteed at least 30% of all other
concessions, with the right to bid for more. The state exchanged its rights to five
billion barrels of oil equivalent to Petrobras for shares in the company, which
investors could purchase as a source of capital for Petrobras’ huge new expansion. A
new institution, Petro-Sal, is 100% state-owned and oversees bidding.
As originally drafted, the revenue regime was a production-sharing rather than
royalty system, with most revenues going to producing regions and the federal
government. A share of the federal revenues would go into a new Social Fund,
controlled by the president’s office, which is to be used for a variety of social and
cultural purposes including environmental sustainability. By far the most controversial
parts of the pre-salt legislation have been about the distribution of benefits—the
revenues that will be paid—and they pitted geographic units of the state against each
other. The first fight saw the federal government yield a larger portion of the royalties to
the states, while the second pits states against each other. The pre-salt region is thought

14
The proposals (PL 5938, 5939, 5940, 5941, all of 2009) are available online with their justifications at
http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Projetos/Quadros/principal2003.htm. Their legislative fates can be
tracked through the lower house (http://www2.camara.gov.br/) and Senate (http://www.senado.gov.br/).
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 365

to stretch along four coastal states, from Santa Catarina to Espiritu Santo. Existing
arrangements pay royalties disproportionately to producing states, but the version of the
bill that left the lower house would distribute royalties equally to all states. This change
would have lowered Rio’s projected royalties by $3–4 billion annually. In March 2010,
150,000 people marched through the city to pressure for using existing royalty
arrangements (O Globo 18 March 2010).
Lula vetoed this revenue-distribution provision near the end of his administration.
After months of conflict, key governors meeting at the end of June 2011 accepted his
proposed alternative arrangement: the national government and producer states and
municipalities receive a larger share of the royalties of pre-salt areas already
auctioned, while non-producer states and municipalities gain a larger share in areas
yet to be explored (O Globo 1 July 2011). In unexplored regions, revenues take the
form of both production-sharing and royalties regimes. While not formally
legislated, this is the most likely royalties outcome. Notwithstanding the months of
conflict, all actors engaged in the revenue debates—including the superficial but
large mobilization—want the pre-salt region developed as an energy source.
Insofar as there is deeper citizen mobilization, it comes mostly from oil workers.
They have been mobilized since 1994 against the privatization of their industry, with
“The Petroleum is Ours!” picking up a historic slogan from the 1940s. They have
used primarily lobbying techniques to push for maximizing Petrobras’ role, which
will increase both jobs and (presumably) the health of their retirement funds invested
in the company. While that calculation gives them a clear interest in exploitation of
the pre-salt, the Gulf spill also raised concerns for them because it began with an
explosion that killed oil workers. One of Petrobras’ oil platforms exploded in 2001,
killing 11, and worker safety is a long-standing area of concern. In response, the
ANP issued a resolution in May 2010, which establishes high standards for platform
safety.15 The Director General of the ANP met with the union leadership to discuss
safety in June, after they had already met with the Ministry of Labor and the Federal
Labor Prosecutor.16 Worker concerns about safety, however, do not extend to an
argument that the pre-salt should not be developed. Thus citizens as workers are also
part of the enabling coalition, with reservations. Workers see their preoccupations as
related, viewing full state ownership and permanent employment in Petrobras as
more conducive to worker safety (Acselrad and Mello 2002: 310).
The global stock market has been quite responsive to the pre-salt discoveries—
and to possible risks that might be associated with developing them. After the pre-
salt finds, Petrobras’s stock price surged to a high of $74.11/share before dropping
with the rest of world markets at the end of 2008. Once oil began to spill in the Gulf
of Mexico, however, Petrobras’s stock value dropped down to prices in the low $30
range, with only BP itself losing more stock value between January and July 2010
among large petroleum producers (Folha de São Paulo 14 July 2010). The sharpest
drops came after the April spill began, suggesting worries about similar problems in
the even deeper pre-salt. Even so, share prices remain high in historic terms, and a

15
ANP Press Release, 5 May 2010. http://www.anp.gov.br/?pg=23548&m=&t1=&t2=&t3=&t4=
&ar=&ps=&cachebust=1279116350744.
16
ANP Press Release, 6/17/10. http://www.anp.gov.br/?pg=27528&m=&t1=&t2=&t3=&t4=&ar=&ps=
&cachebust=1279126358477.
366 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

share offering in October 2010 raised $70 billion, the largest in world history.17
Millions of investors are part of the enabling coalition.
If the enabling coalition shows signs of division and concern, it still favors
development of the pre-salt reserves. That is likely to prevail in the absence of a
blocking coalition. Major spills in the pre-salt areas could be quite damaging to the
state and the city of Rio de Janeiro, which rely on tourism, fishing, and other ocean-
based industries. The city’s natural beauty and environmental credentials formed part
of its successful bid for the 2016 Olympics. Yet, the pre-salt has not generated much
environmental mobilization, even locally. Greenpeace Brasil opposes the drilling,
but has only held a few small protests (O Globo 8 August 2010). In the remainder of
this section, I explore some of the potential reasons for the lack of mobilization,
which activists themselves could not readily explain.
It is not for lack of evidence of the environmental and livelihood hazards of
petroleum production. Petrobras has had a number of oil spills and other accidents.
Researchers tallied 53 environmental accidents from 1997 to 2007 using newspaper
and environmental agency sources (while Petrobras reported only 15 during that
time to investors). Both series noted a surge in accidents in the years from 1999 to
2003, with 2000 marked by especially serious spills in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara
Bay and off the state of Paraná (Rodrigues et al. 2009: 9). The Guanabara Bay
accident resulted in a new law (9966/2000) that set fines for oil spills at $3.77–27
million plus clean-up costs and possible reparations. It also called for writing a
National Contingency Plan to deal with oil spills, but that is only now back on the
agenda. Even the ANP director Lima admitted to the BBC that the basic fines were
probably too low to provide sufficient incentives for petroleum companies to avoid
spills.18 Environmentalists mobilized in 2000 to decry Petrobras’ environmental
laxness, and workers blamed Petrobras’ use of contract labor (Acselrad and Mello
2002). Yet only workers have been active most recently.
Socio-environmentalists have all the institutional strategies at hand that they used
in the Belo Monte case, including the environmental licensing process and the MP,
but are not using them. Oil and gas exploration and production have been subject to
environmental licensing since 1986 but privatization required new measures
(Mariano and La Rovere 2007). Initial ANP auctions of new concessions to private
firms took no note of environmental considerations, but simply offered blocks that
were likely to contain fuels. On finding that they might purchase blocks that could
not receive environmental licenses, entrepreneurs demanded ways to reduce the
regulatory risk. A case in the Federal Audit Court in 2003 required ANP to discuss
the environmental conditions of the blocks (ibid: 2902). Over the next years, ANP
worked with Ibama to overlay geological maps on environmental ones, so that
purchasers could know the likelihood of environmental sensitivity, and some
proposed blocks were excluded from auction.
Permits come slowly by industry standards for Petrobras, although they are much
faster than those for hydroelectric plants. A study of recent licenses shows that large
plants received permits, on average, in 20.05 months while small plants were licensed
much more quickly (Carpio and Guedes 2007: 337). Licensing for the pre-salt is still

17
All stock share prices from finance.yahoo.com.
18
http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/2010/06/100617_anp_fp_rc.shtml
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 367

mostly in the future, but indications so far are that it will not be slower than usual. The
pre-salt areas have been previously designated as having low environmental sensitivity
(Ministério de Minas e Energia 2010: 302). The permits for exploratory drilling in the
Tupi/Lula block, one of the first in the original pre-salt area, moved very quickly. The
Terms of Reference were posted on 20 May 2008 and the third and final Operational
Environmental License was granted on 17 April 2009.19 A public audience in
November drew mostly from fishing and labor groups, and no court cases were
recorded.
Petrobras and the Brazilian state have also sought to embody the idea of the
anticipatory state over the last decade. Petrobras undertook a major effort after the
earlier spills to reorient its operations and rebrand itself as environmentally
responsible (Acselrad and Mello 2002). Petrobras prizes its image as a modern
corporation and means to “differentiate itself by quality” in the competitive
petroleum market (Volpon and de Macedo-Soares 2007: 402). It meets both ISO
14001 and OHSAS 18001 standards for environment and occupational health and
safety, respectively. It participates in the Global Reporting Initiative, winning
awards, and joined the UN Global Pact in 2003. It prepares and regularly updates its
own safety and health standards. Since 2006, it has been in the Dow Jones
Sustainability Index and was also in the equivalent Bovespa (São Paulo stock
exchange) index until it was removed in late 2008 for being slow to reduce sulfur in
its diesel. Since Petrobras’s products include expertise—especially in deep-sea
drilling—as well as oil, these are questions of profitability as well as environmental
responsibility (Volpon and de Macedo-Soares 2007: 402).
In the pre-salt case, the government’s rhetoric is certainly in line with an anticipatory
state. Environmental activists in Brazil rarely believe such promises; on the contrary,
they tend to think that they need to always remain able to spring into action to prod a
state that cannot be relied upon to make good on its own laws (Hochstetler and Keck
2007: 225–229). They have not put together a blocking coalition on the pre-salt,
however, and the present coalition of enabling actors is more likely to have its
preferred energy project go forward in some way as a consequence.

Conclusions

Citizens appear in different guises in two of Brazil’s recent energy policy debates. In
the debates over building the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, a wide variety of
citizens are present. They include local resident communities of indigenous peoples
and others with lifestyles at stake. National and international environmental
organizations also participated, with support from networks of those affected by
dams elsewhere. It is hard to think of any strategies of influence that went unused
over the 35 years this project was debated—lawsuits, lobbying, protests, studies,
public audiences, and more. All of these groups joined together in a blocking
coalition that is familiar to any observer of Brazilian socio-environmentalism.
Private actors also favored building the dam, but they tended to let the state lead an
enabling coalition that pushed very hard over decades until it finally gained the

19
See the licensing website in footnote 2.
368 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

authority to build a version, albeit one that was greatly changed by years of
resistance.
Participation in debates on developing Brazil’s pre-salt is considerably more
truncated. The angriest voices in the Gulf of Mexico around the BP deep-sea drilling
accident were environmentalists and local people whose jobs depend on the ocean.
Their equivalents are almost absent from public debate on the pre-salt in Brazil.
Instead, workers are trying to reduce the risks of workplace casualties, but want the
jobs to continue. The only mass participation so far favors keeping Rio’s share of a
royalty pot that it hopes will expand. In this case, then, even with a particularly
graphic image of what is potentially at stake, the blocking coalition is absent. An
enabling coalition of state and private economic actors argued over the distribution
of revenues from oil development, but were able to move quickly through the
licensing process and into production.
What do these observations suggest about the usefulness of an analytical
approach that focuses on blocking and enabling coalitions and, more generally, the
roles of citizens in development decisions? The approach is clearly useful in the
Belo Monte case, helping to make sense of a large number of actors and their
shifting strategies over a long period of time. One coalition pushed forward to build
the dam, modifying its plans as it faced multiple kinds of resistance from another
coalition. While the financial decision point derailed the project in its initial form,
the environmental licensing process was indeed the site where the 21st century
version took its eventual shape and timing. In the pre-salt case, the framework
performs the different task of identifying an absence, the lack of a blocking coalition.
This is especially useful in the broader context of the study of citizen contention, as
most such studies examine only the positive cases of mobilization that appear.
Comparison of the two projects allows the obvious conclusion that a two-sided
debate takes longer and is much more contentious than a policy debate where only
one side has a voice, either by design or by the failure to use available channels.
From first conception in 1975 to groundbreaking in 2011, the Belo Monte project
took 36 years; the environmental impact assessment took ten. From the discovery of
off-shore oil in December 2007 to the third and final license in April 2009, the pre-
salt took 17 months. The long time may seem like a disadvantage for a developing
country that urgently needs more energy, but there are compensations. A number of
Brazil’s early hydroelectric dams, built in the 1970s and 1980s before the blocking
coalition could form and influence a military government, are strikingly badly
planned, flooding vast areas and displacing many more people for small quantities of
electricity (Fearnside 2002; Khagram 2004). The dam being built now is a clear
improvement in socio-environmental terms over the one that would have been built
in 1975 or even 1999, and was reformulated a number of times in response to
criticisms. The Brazilian government and Petrobras assure that the pre-salt projects
are the best possible, but there simply has not been time for extended public debate
and challenges that might have led to important modifications.
Two-sided debates depend on the emergence of both coalitions. Enabling
coalitions tend to emerge readily enough for large energy projects. The evident
need for energy to support economic growth and citizen consumption in a
developing democracy makes governments ready to sign on, and profit incentives
bring a variety of economic actors along too. At certain points here, actors who
St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371 369

might have wanted to enable energy projects were stymied by the lack of funding, as
in the effective moratorium on dam building after IFIs withdrew their funds and the
Brazilian state entered into fiscal crisis. However, the strength of an enabling
coalition is facilitated by a certain substitutability of its partners, with both state and
private economic actors able to finance and build. While beyond the empirical scope
of this article, smaller-scale and less profitable energy projects like solar and wind
power often lack exactly this kind of enabling coalition.
The more relevant question for large-scale projects is when blocking coalitions
form. Examining commonalities among the sustained mobilizations of citizens that
did occur offers some potential answers. These included the local residents who
joined with environmental activists to block Belo Monte as well as the workers who
were part of the pre-salt enabling coalition. One commonality of these mobilized
citizens is that they were facing immediate and fairly certain impacts that were
clearly negative for Amazonian residents. The more normatively driven environ-
mental activists also saw certain immediate socio-environmental harms of the Belo
Monte dam. Petroleum workers also responded to immediate impacts, but they were
more mixed, including immediate benefits in the form of jobs, with some job safety
risks that they thought could be managed. The petroleum that will be produced in the
pre-salt region is a non-renewable fuel that will cause greenhouse gas emissions, and
there are low-probability, high-hazard risks of a major spill. As others have argued, costs
that are distant and hard to measure rarely mobilize citizens compared to job safety and
“backyard” destruction kinds of hazards (see also Sjöberg 1997; Sunstein 2005).
A second commonality is one noted in the social movements literature:
mobilization in one instance tends to follow the strategies and networks laid down
in earlier successful participation and so mobilization begets mobilization (McAdam
et al. 1996). The opposition to Belo Monte shows this pattern, being sustained by a
network of national and international activists that had already opposed large dams
for years. Petroleum workers banded together and won some concessions in the
battle against privatization of Petrobras, and did so again with worker safety issues at
the turn of the century. In both instances, citizens could point to past gains as a
reason for current mobilization, while interviewed environmentalists couldn’t
imagine putting together a coalition that could stop development of the pre-salt.
While innovation is always possible, this commonality suggests that blocking
coalitions are most likely when they can be built out of existing experiences and
networks of mobilization.
Both of these arguments suggest society-based reasons that civil society will not
automatically participate. There is systematic under-mobilization for risk situations
that do not involve immediate and direct hazards and on issues where citizens lack
mobilizing networks. Under-mobilization or ineffective participation is even more
likely to be a problem in other developing countries for state-based reasons. They
often lack the transparency and opportunities for participation in the licensing
process that Brazilian environmentalists have painstakingly gained (Hochstetler and
Keck 2007). Most are missing judicial tools as powerful as the Ministério Público
that can stop construction in its tracks (McAllister 2008). The Brazilian examples
thus represent a near-high point in terms of the amount of citizen participation and
influence that is likely in energy decision making in developing countries. The
recent OAS recommendation shows that even here, participation may fall short in
370 St Comp Int Dev (2011) 46:349–371

quality even when opportunities are comparatively plentiful, although the Brazilian
government strongly disagrees.
On balance, citizens’ participation appears useful in decision making on energy
when it does appear and is considered. Participation does not always lead to consent
or harmonized preferences, as the un-reconciled conflict of the Belo Monte case
shows. Yet citizen participation slows down project development for debate and
discussion in ways that can improve outcomes, even with conflict. Early versions of
hydroelectric dams in Brazil and elsewhere offer evidence that governments and the
private energy-construction complex will not give enough attention to project costs
and hazards without a blocking coalition (Khagram 2004). In the Brazilian cases
examined here, the likelihood of mobilized opposition has meant that environmental
considerations are brought into planning much earlier, and there is more
transparency of the environmental licensing process. These are net gains that are
steps towards improving socio-environmental outcomes even without active
mobilization. If the most likely forms of citizen participation do not do enough to
consider broader societal impacts of energy choices, the solution is other kinds of
political opportunities for citizen participation that do.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Rebecca Abers, Siri Gloppen, Annette Hester, Margaret
Keck, José Augusto Pádua, Eduardo Viola and the SCID reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions
on previous versions.

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Kathryn Hochstetler is CIGI Chair of Governance in the Americas at the Balsillie School of International
Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She is the author of
numerous publications on Brazilian civil society and environmental politics, including the award winning
book, Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society (Duke, 2007, co-authored with
Margaret Keck.