Dissertation
Bureaucracy Matters:
Organizational Structure and Performance in Brazil’s Protected Areas Agency
Organizational Structure and Performance in Brazil’s Protected Areas Agency
Success in the fight against climate change, the global biodiversity crisis, and other environmental problems requires that countries implement the environmental policies they adopt. Yet environmental agencies often struggle to carry out the tasks delegated to them.
I explore the foundations of environmental state capacity through an in-depth study of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio). ICMBio is a severely under-resourced Brazilian federal agency tasked with an enormous mission: protecting some of the most biodiverse yet contested landscapes on Earth, across a jurisdiction that is nearly twice the area of California and distributed across Brazil. I draw on more than 100 interviews with street-level bureaucrats, agency managers, former Brazilian environment ministry leadership, and civil society. I pair qualitative insights with econometric analyses covering the 335 protected areas falling within ICMBio’s jurisdiction, and their associated management units, over 10 years.
The majority of my study concentrates on organizational structure as a critical determinant of agency performance. I first highlight the importance of effective spatial allocation of agency personnel, showing that straightforward personnel re-allocation strategies in the Chico Mendes Institute could have reduced deforestation within Brazilian federal protected areas by 19 percent over the agency’s first ten years. This is nearly three times the reduction the agency could have achieved by doubling the size of all of its 335 sub-units, implying scope for major performance gains from a relatively low-cost management intervention. Second, I examine the political and institutional history that produced this apparent personnel misallocation, emphasizing the role of initial agency design decisions and a politics of fairness in the authorization of changes to Brazilian civil service management procedure. Third, I use the case of ICMBio under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who sought to dismantle his country’s environmental agencies, to explore sources of institutional resilience under conditions of populist, anti-environment leadership.
This research “brings the state back in” to environmental policy studies. In doing so, it suggests ways to improve government performance where resources are scarce and highlights institutional designs that help to ensure environmental progress in times of political opposition.
I explore the foundations of environmental state capacity through an in-depth study of the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio). ICMBio is a severely under-resourced Brazilian federal agency tasked with an enormous mission: protecting some of the most biodiverse yet contested landscapes on Earth, across a jurisdiction that is nearly twice the area of California and distributed across Brazil. I draw on more than 100 interviews with street-level bureaucrats, agency managers, former Brazilian environment ministry leadership, and civil society. I pair qualitative insights with econometric analyses covering the 335 protected areas falling within ICMBio’s jurisdiction, and their associated management units, over 10 years.
The majority of my study concentrates on organizational structure as a critical determinant of agency performance. I first highlight the importance of effective spatial allocation of agency personnel, showing that straightforward personnel re-allocation strategies in the Chico Mendes Institute could have reduced deforestation within Brazilian federal protected areas by 19 percent over the agency’s first ten years. This is nearly three times the reduction the agency could have achieved by doubling the size of all of its 335 sub-units, implying scope for major performance gains from a relatively low-cost management intervention. Second, I examine the political and institutional history that produced this apparent personnel misallocation, emphasizing the role of initial agency design decisions and a politics of fairness in the authorization of changes to Brazilian civil service management procedure. Third, I use the case of ICMBio under former President Jair Bolsonaro, who sought to dismantle his country’s environmental agencies, to explore sources of institutional resilience under conditions of populist, anti-environment leadership.
This research “brings the state back in” to environmental policy studies. In doing so, it suggests ways to improve government performance where resources are scarce and highlights institutional designs that help to ensure environmental progress in times of political opposition.
