From d/Development to e/Environment: The Contradictions of Aid Interventions Remixed

Facing the urgency of the climate crisis and primarily negotiations around the quantity of climate finance, fewer scholars have critically looked at the strategic interventions of finance for the environment and its relationship with the causes and uneven distribution of environmental harm. This article offers such an analysis by critically considering the embeddedness of environmental aid in international political economies of capital accumulation, particularly the established institutional landscape of North-South foreign assistance for development. The big D’ and small d’ development distinction in development sociology and critical geography has framed critical examinations of how Global South interventions of the international aid apparatus comprising donor agencies and NGOs (big D’) seek to ameliorate and, at the same time, deepen the dynamics of neoliberal capital accumulation and uneven globalized development (small d’). This article applies this framework to the analysis of environmental aid and foreign climate finance, drawing on in-depth research on influential environmental aid initiatives in Brazil’s Amazon since the 1990s and triangulating interview, archival, and observational data. It argues that environmental aid networks and interventions have been fundamental to realizing the privatization and financialization of natural resource management in local policymaking and, more recently, de-risking climate investment in the hyped bioeconomy sectors through public-private partnerships. This approach–mirroring the dominant development dynamics–has neglected globalization's structural extractivism, inequality-driving effects, and the need for multi-level democratic control over finite common goods. Linking debates on development, environment, and society in sociology, the article offers a framework to interrogate the business-as-usual institutions and mechanisms behind promises of transformation.