Combatting deforestation driven by EU-Brazil supply chains: The interactions between place-based and flow-based governance

Brazil, which accounts for 60% of the Amazon biome, is known for its rich biodiversity. However, since the beginning of the 1970s, Brazil’s biomes have suffered massive deforestation, primarily driven by large scale forest conversion to cattle ranching and soy cultivation for domestic consumption and foreign export, especially to China and several European Union (EU) member states. Illegal logging and timber exports have financed development of pasture and soy plantations in deforested areas. In recent years, several governance initiatives have emerged to address deforestation caused by global commodity trade between Brazil and the EU. On the one hand, there have been place-based arrangements encompassing territorial forms of governance in Brazil, such as the forest code revised in 2012, the rural environmental registry (CAR), the program for granting land titles to smallholders (‘terra legal’) and the law number 13.465 from July 2017 that regulates the formalization of land titles. On the other hand, governance has also taken the form of flow-based arrangements aimed at reducing environmental impacts such as deforestation in resource-intensive flows through certification schemes like the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS) or public policies like the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR). However, while a growing body of literature has analyzed existing governance arrangements addressing trade between Brazil and the EU, the interaction between these instruments, and in particular the question under which conditions place-based governance undermines or reinforces flow-based initiatives remain largely under-explored. Drawing upon the existing literature on policy coherence and interactions (Oberthür and Gehring, 2006; Nilsson et al. 2012), this article aims to contribute to scholarship on the interactions at the level of policy objectives, instruments, implementation and outcomes of governance arrangements occurring between Brazil and the EU in relation to three commodity flows (i.e., forestry, meat, and soy). By examining specific environmental problems, how they are addressed, and specific governance challenges the article will assess which arrangements have more effectively addressed the problem of deforestation, and how. Based on our findings, we will also discuss the question of how new supply chain regulations based on a due diligence approach in European countries and at the EU level could learn from previous experiences.