Flexibility as Theory of Change in the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry

ABSTRACT: Sugarcane in Brazil has been used for centuries to make refined sugar and, more recently, ethanol-based biofuels. The flexibility to switch between sugar and biofuel production at the mill, depending on market prices, is often explicitly presented as key to the viability of the sector amid chronic production crises. In Brazil, sugarcane is not only for sugar anymore. While many take this flexibility as a self-evident, inherent property, this article instead argues that Brazilian sugarcane flexibility is only achieved through technical and infrastructural practices. In the practice and achievement of flexibility, something more is made too: flexibility becomes a story-telling device that generates meaning beyond the notion of flexibility itself. This further meaning is around ideas of change. Specifically, flexibility constitutes an articulation of a theory of change that involves a certain warrant for change—industry crisis—and a certain mechanism of change: making the industry plastic and agile rather than asking why it is in crisis in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sugarcane actors in São Paulo, this article examines flexibility's social lives not reducible to neoliberalism and post-Fordism, and demonstrates the analytical necessity to not take properties of products or production systems for granted. At stake most broadly is that flexibility's theory of change maintains the status quo, locating change in the properties of materials rather than the operation of broader systems that utilize those materials, like extractive capitalism, even when those broader systems are the cause of the problems that flexibility is intended to respond to.