The « climatization » of a policy instrument : an analysis of the Brazilian Low Carbon Agriculture Plan (ABC)

In a world where climate change became a central problem for policymakers to manage - in different levels of governance (internationally, nationally and locally) - understanding how public policy instruments for ecological transitions and decarbonization are designed and chosen is of growing interest and have been explored in recent works. This paper therefore engages in this debate addressing the construction process of the ABC Plan, an official instrument of the Brazilian National Climate Change Policy for the decarbonization of the agricultural sector. To what extent can we observe a « climatization » of preexisting policy instruments in this process? We understang by « climatization » the action where actors present something (an issue, a solution; an instrument) that previously were not directly related to the climate problem through « climate terms ». An interesting element in this policy making process is that, even before the official publication of the Plan, the Ministry of Agriculture was already implementing an economic financing instrument called the ABC Program, which was incorporated into the agriculture credit instruments portfolio already in 2010/2011. As the official ABC Plan text was published in 2012 which made us question whether this policy brought something new or whether it was not a recycling of already existing devices, a reworking, perhaps an « climatization ». This study is based on the author's doctoral research using a qualitative methodology, including 30 semi-structured interviews with key informants (mostly identified on the Plan official document and snowball method) and the analysis of official documents as primary sources of data (primarily government texts such as decrees and laws). The argument developed is that the release of the Plan was possible on account of the formation and action of an epistemic community composed mainly by the experts of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) who have been able to reformulate old solutions that were already well accepted by the actors of the sector and the government, reshaping them to fit the climate change terms.