Greenwashing Autocratisation: Militarised Environmental Governance in Brazil and Indonesia

In recent years, the military has assumed an increasingly prominent role in environmental protection across diverse political regimes. Soldiers are deployed to fight forest fires, police illegal logging and guard conservation zones. Governments present these interventions as technocratic and patriotic responses to urgent ecological crises. Yet the growing involvement of armed forces in environmental governance raises important questions about civil-military relations and democratic control. This paper examines how populist leaders with military backgrounds - Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia - have mobilised environmental protection to legitimise and deepen the militarisation of civilian governance. It argues that these practices constitute “greenwashing autocratisation”; a strategy that cloaks the expansion of military authority and the erosion of democratic oversight in the language of environmental guardianship. In both cases, the environment has become a venue through which populist executives with self-declared nostalgia for military rule to weaken civilian institutions, reassert military authority and facilitate access to protected areas for private economic interests. Environmental protection is thus invoked to justify militarisation, while militarisation in turn undermines both democratic accountability and - ironically - ecological integrity. Situating these developments within broader global trend of autocratisation, the paper shows how environmental governance lends itself to securitisation and executive aggrandizement. Drawing on comparative process tracing, elite discourse and policy analysis, the study identifies three mechanisms underpinning this process: 1) the securitisation of environmental crises, 2) the erosion of civil-military boundaries under populist leadership, and 2) the formation of state-business-military compacts linking environmental control to extractive agendas. By bridging environmental politics, civil-military studies and research on democratic backsliding, the article demonstrates how militarised environmental governance functions as a form of autocratisation in post-authoritarian democracies central to global climate governance.