The Amazon as a global carbon sink:sociological essays in a burning world

This dissertation centers the Amazon Rainforest as a key location for understanding the global climate breakdown we currently live through. I build on five years of field research, which includes (a)content analysis of hundreds of documents, (b) in-depth interviews with local and global actors, (c) diverse administrative and environmental quantitative data, and (d) recurring field visits to protected areas and bureaucracies in the Brazilian Amazon. The first article, "Pathways of the Environmental State," shows how defining features of state-building are transformed due to environmental problems' global and scientific dimensions. Empirically, I implement a comparative-historical framework to explain how Brazil successfully decarbonized from 1985 to 2022. The second article, “Financialization as Transnational Policy Insulation,” proposes a socio-legal framework to understand transnational climate finance over the last three decades. The third article, “Which Amazon Problem?” explains how and why Brazilian Presidents construct the Amazon as distinct problems. Using a dataset containing all official speeches since 1985 and their location, we show that all presidents, independent of ideology, are likelier to favour environmental conservation as they speak away from the region. The dissertation also includes three intermezzos that discuss, among other things, how qualitative fieldwork changes in the age of new computational methods. Together, these articles make contributions to transnational, environmental, political, and economic sociologies.