Deforestation in the Amazon is economically rational under the existing legal and enforcement regime.
Evidence
The IBAMA had the authority to fine ranchers with the backing of the federal government. But they also ran up against the other concrete power structures in Brazil’s political economy. The president governing from Brazil’s capital, BrasĂlia, does not control every aspect of life on the ground any more than politicians in Washington, DC, could micromanage frontier law in the Wild West. If you worked the courts right or put operations in the name of some low-level criminal, the benefit of the deforestation could outweigh any fines incurred. That is, given the real set of regulations and punishments within the Amazon, it is economically rational to cut it down. Indeed, the local political structures were often highly sympathetic to the deforestation economy, if not entirely dependent upon it. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 319
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to a standing theme about states lacking ground-level control over frontier economies, paralleling the base-hosting and colonial governance literatures read before. — connects to: Amazon deforestation is economically rational under existing incentives — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 319; Charges of neocolonialism justify deforestation by recasting conservation as foreign domination. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2533
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: what specific court mechanisms and straw-man ownership registrations make the fine cheaper than compliance?
Broader Connections
- Amazon deforestation is economically rational under existing incentives
#expands(0.97) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 319 - Charges of neocolonialism justify deforestation by recasting conservation as foreign domination.
#qualifies(0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2533