Agribusiness Corporations and Climate Change Hegemony in Brazil

My paper arises from a paradox: while agribusiness corporations are responsible for the majority of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions, they are also at the forefront of the country’s response to the climate crisis. Therefore, how have the largest Brazilian agribusiness corporations articulated themselves to build and maintain their hegemony in the country’s response to climate change? To answer this question, I chose to analyze the hegemony of agribusiness corporations in the climate agenda as a “regime” following the theoretical and methodological framework of Glynos and Howarth (2007) they call the logics of critical explanation. This allows me to engage in a dialogue with studies on corporate hegemony in the climate agenda within the organizational studies literature. This line of work has shown how rhetorical games of scale and time, tactical diversions, or concessions to environmental demands are key pillars for the longevity of corporate hegemony in the climate agenda. However, this line of work has found it difficult to explain why, despite the multiplication of extreme weather events, corporate hegemony still receives public consent. I contribute to this theoretical gap by introducing the study of fantasmatic logic in discourse. My research shows how, in the environmental and climate discourse of agribusiness corporate leaders, affect explains the binding force of the hegemonic discourse. This limits agribusiness corporate leaders’ questioning of the current agribusiness model and, therefore, the adequacy of the sector’s response to the scale and severity of the climate crisis.