Brazil’s Environmental Foreign Policy in the COP30: the Limits of Overstretching

Brazil’s environmental foreign policy (2023-2025) illustrates the contradictions of environmental governance in a changing global order marked by the crisis of neoliberalism, imperialist geopolitics and the contested U.S. hegemony. Drawing on Neo-Marxist critique of capitalism’s ecological and social contradictions and debates on post-neoliberal global governance, this paper examines Brazil's multifaceted undertakings to strengthen multilateralism through the global mutirão (collective efforts) and to advance sustainable finance, including the launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility and the transition away from a fossil fuel-dependent economy. While Brazil portraited itself as a Global South leader, its strategy remained entangled in the structural constraints of financialized capitalism and the geopolitical asymmetries shaping the contested transition to a new world order. By tracing the process of Brazilian environmental foreign policies and the COP30 political process based on semi-structured interviews, this paper argue that Brazil’s environmental leadership was overstretched and mirrors the configuration of a domestic environmental power bloc, reflecting the limits of post-neoliberal reform within the neo-extractivist trap, where progressive agendas coexist with dependency structures. The influence of positive environmental leadership in Brazil is contingent on the state's relative autonomy from the political processes of capitalist relations in any given historical conjuncture. This study contributes to critical environmental politics by revealing how material and ideological struggles shape climate governance and the contested pathways toward an ecological and energy transition in the Global South.