Climate change and environmental governance: The role of environmental non-governmental organizations in Brazil

In the context of climate change (CC) as a socio-environmental theme and of the earth governance, the formulation process of environmental pubic policies resorts to and assimilates in its discourse knowledge produced and/or disseminated by a number of actors in order to give grounding to decision making. One actor has come to the fore in the environmental debate due to its increasingly prominent role: Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). There is an assumption that NGOs, as actors in the environmental governance system, are capable of influencing the debate on CC, deploying knowledge and information which lay on the interface between the social sciences and the natural sciences.

This present study aims at discussing the role of NGOs with regard to the construction of political positions of social actors involved with environmental governance taking the dissemination of knowledge on CC as a starting point. This study investigated online databases on the NGOs and the respective websites in order to assess the publications analyzed based on 4 previously established categories. Lastly, the study is mapping possible actor networks established based on the authorship of the publications.

11 Brazilian environmental NGOs were selected as well as 28 publications on CC. There is a clear interest in the Amazon. The theme of mitigation is favored by comparison to themes such as adaptation and vulnerability, which contain more of a social element and have attracted recent interest in Brazil, reflecting an international tendency. In this context, the study on the NGOs is a complex one, which observes the dialogue between the different fields of science; the interests of international demands; and the influence of the knowledge produced on the political position of the many actors in the realm of Earth Governance.