Contesting unilateralism: The case of the EU deforestation regulation in Brazil

In recent decades, accelerating climate change has spurred mitigation efforts focused on forests and natural habitats. Different governance arrangements have thus been established with the goal of decoupling deforestation and clearances of other types of native vegetation from expansion of agriculture and livestock production. As these predominantly private governance arrangements rely on voluntary commitments, their non-binding character and lacking enforcement has meant that important deadlines for curbing deforestation driven by critical forest-risk commodities have been missed. The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has been created in this context, with the goal of instituting mandatory due diligence rules for a range of agricultural commodities imported by the EU. Although juridically, this regulation does not apply in producer countries, it is nonetheless bound to have strong practical effects within these regions, as sourcing agents from the EU demand EUDR compliant products. The normative goal of zero-deforestation, as it has been sought disseminated within the EUDR, has therefore been strongly contested by many suppliers to the EU, namely in developing countries. In this study, we examine the process of norm contestation of the EUDR in Brazil, and how different stakeholders in this country have positioned themselves. Assessing the specific type of norm contestation, we find that the main point of contention relates to the procedural domain, rather than the applicability or validity of the zero-deforestation norm per-se. Hence, Brazilian actors are not necessarily opposed to combating deforestation, but rather to the specific way this goal has been conceptualized through the EUDR. More broadly, our results raise questions about the expediency of the unilateralism embodied within the EUDR, and of this type of regulation as a means to advance environmentally compliant production and consumption at the global level.