Making more than a market: environmental marketization and the politics of landscapes and distribution in the Brazilian Amazon

Creating new markets is an increasingly prevalent strategy to address environmental degradation. This dissertation examines the politics and social significance of one prominent environmental marketization policy—the System of Incentives for Environmental Services (SISA) in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil. SISA allowed for the issuance and sale of "carbon credits, " which represent reductions in climate-changing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, to outside polluters and other buyers. Yet SISA entailed much more than making a market in carbon, this dissertation reveals. SISA's approach made carbon credits and ecosystem services—often dismissed as neoliberal—into tools of redistribution that expanded and reshaped the state through providing rural welfare. SISA's redistributive approach also undermined rural residents' ability to claim rights to carbon revenue, instead assigning them the precarious government-granted status of "beneficiary." SISA's use of "incentives" to intensify production to protect the forest also contained its own contradictions and exclusions. It favored field over forest and expertise over rural knowledge, threatening to increase deforestation and benefit wealthier landholders. However, such wide-ranging marketization efforts were not implemented without impediment. Rather, Acre's landscapes and politics mediated carbon's marketization through rural people's every day negotiations and land use practices, in ways that challenge both theory of environmental markets and critiques of them. This ethnography shows how environmental marketization can constitute a key and undetermined arena of moral struggle and collaboration between the state and those it governs.

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