Livio Silva-Muller
Speaker
Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard Academy
How Brazil Decarbonized the Amazon Rainforest
Date and Time
April 7, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
This talk explains an extraordinary event: how Brazil achieved one of the most successful cases of decarbonization ever recorded, and how those results were later undone. Drawing on archival work, in-depth interviews, and quantitative data, the talk traces the development of decarbonization capacity within the Brazilian bureaucracy from 1985 to 2022. It reveals a new pathway for environmental policy: domestic bureaucrats and national scientists built state capacity by leveraging transnational ties that provided both political shelter and resources for policy experimentation. Over time, these arrangements consolidated the infrastructural reach of decarbonization policies, but also brought them into conflict with powerful economic elites. As elite opposition organized, implementation stalled, yet core capacities remained in place due to a minimal agreement that decarbonization constituted a legitimate state responsibility. I argue that democratic backsliding ultimately disrupted this equilibrium, as opponents gained control of the bureaucracy and eroded state capacity by targeting the global and scientific foundations on which decarbonization had been built.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Alisha C. Holland
Moderator
Professor of Government, Department of Government
Bios
Livio Silva-Muller is a sociologist interested in how states, markets, and societies confront the challenges of decarbonisation, inequality, and democracy from a comparative perspective. He studies the Global South, particularly Brazil, South Africa, and other Latin American countries. Using a range of methods, his work is driven by questions such as how states develop the capacity to decarbonise and redistribute; how global and domestic constraints shape these processes; and how the worldviews of political and economic elites influence their trajectories.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).
Alisha C. Holland studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of infrastructure investment in Latin America. Prior to joining the faculty, she was an assistant professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.