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 today, environmental agencies in developing countries often struggle to carry out the tasks delegated to them, and researchers have insufficiently explored what produces this dysfunction and how to address it.
My dissertation, Bureaucracy Matters: Organizational Structure and Performance in Brazil’s Protected Areas Agency, takes up these questions 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 bureaucratic structure as a critical determinant of environmental state capacity. 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 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 severe 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 President Jair Bolsonaro, who sought to dismantle his country’s environmental agencies, to shed light on the institutional underpinnings that facilitate policy implementation even under 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 capable of ensuring environmental progress in times of political opposition.
My dissertation, Bureaucracy Matters: Organizational Structure and Performance in Brazil’s Protected Areas Agency, takes up these questions 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 bureaucratic structure as a critical determinant of environmental state capacity. 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 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 severe 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 President Jair Bolsonaro, who sought to dismantle his country’s environmental agencies, to shed light on the institutional underpinnings that facilitate policy implementation even under 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 capable of ensuring environmental progress in times of political opposition.
