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The question of how to generate development while preserving the environment is central to the history of the Brazilian Amazon. Many decades of top-down state interventions conceived and executed under a developmentalist framework have resulted in a socioenvironmental crisis. In response, the Sustainable Oil Palm Production Program (SPOPP) was launched in 2010. It promised to break with developmentalist visions and articulate environmental and sustainability concerns. This paper uses assemblage thinking to examine how these contrasting, often impossible-to-balance, views manifest within SPOPP implementation. We describe how non-human actors (trees, diseases, previous policies and agroecological zoning technologies) interact with human actors. However, powerful actors, in the state and beyond, continue to garner support for their developmentalist interests and thwart or depoliticize environmental and social concerns, thus limiting change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the paradoxical behaviour of Brazil in relation to its national and international approaches to the regulations of access to genetic resources and benefits sharing with indigenous and other traditional communities. Brazil was one of the leaders in the international negotiations that led to the UN Nagoya Protocol but only ratified it 11 years later, after remarkable transformations of its internal biodiversity laws. We suggest that the seemingly contradictory behaviour has been shaped by the country's internal political and ideological changes. This transformation goes hand in hand with substantial changes in state–society relations, particularly with regard to the balance of coalitions' power between indigenous groups and industrial and agrarian elites. The article builds on the literature on state transformations and relies on the Advocacy Coalition Framework to show the importance of considering the impact of national-level politics on the fate of international agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to identify and comprehend the challenges and strengths behind public policies on integrating waste pickers (WPs) within waste management systems in Colombia and Brazil. In both, WPs started to come together and found organisations and external agents such as NGOs began to support organised groups of WPs. After 10 years of judicial court actions in Colombia, WPs organisations were finally recognised in legislation, while in Brazil, they were recognised in 2007 in one of the national policies through lobby. Today, there are almost 700 WPs organisations formalised in Colombia and 1700 in Brazil. Their public policies' main achievements and challenges are exposed to supply knowledge to other countries interested in this theme. A Roadmap for the organisation and formalisation of WPs within waste management systems was created. This constitutes a source of information for policymakers in other emerging economies to address this in their territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]