Bureaucratic Motivations and the Concept of Activism

In his classic 1940 article, Robert Merton declared that bureaucrats inevitably develop dysfunctional personalities. The constant pressure to be “methodical, prudent, disciplined” (1952, 365) produces “timidity, conservativism, and technicism” (367). Following Merton, many theorists presumed that bureaucrats were essentially rule followers, whose main problem involved dealing with uncertainty about which rules to apply (Turner Reference Turner, Merton, Gray, Hockey and Selvin1952; Crozier Reference Crozier1969). In contrast, the rational actor school proposed that bureaucrats are not obsessed with the rules; they think only of themselves. This presumption is the basis of the vast literature on the principal-agent problem in public bureaucracies (Waterman and Meier Reference Waterman and Meier1998). Here, bureaucrats are utility maximizers who seek higher salaries for as little effort as possible. The principal-agent literature focuses largely on how to build incentives and sanctions into contracts so that bureaucrats can be pressured and coerced into doing what politicians want (Lane Reference Lane2005, 33; DiIulio Reference DiIulio1994).

A third tradition suggests more complex (and less predictable) motivations that fit better with the notion of bureaucratic activism. A diversity of scholars argue that bureaucrats can be moved by values, ideologies, or political projects, not just rules and incentives. Some policy theories place bureaucrats into networks bound by shared policy ideals or beliefs (Haas Reference Haas1992; Sabatier Reference Sabatier1988). Studies of lower-level bureaucrats suggest that they not only respond to sanctions and incentives affecting their self-interest but also act on beliefs. These may be moral beliefs (Lipsky Reference Lipsky2010; Maynard-Moody and Musheno Reference Maynard-Moody and Musheno2003), professional norms (Tummers Reference Tummers2011; Tummers et al. Reference Tummers, Vermeeren, Steijn and Bekkers2012), or social, racial, or gender sympathies or prejudices (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2014; Meier Reference Meier1975; Meier and O’Toole Reference Meier and O’Toole2006). Career motivation studies find public employees to be less concerned with salary than with “intrinsic” rewards (such as the inherent value of their work) than are private sector workers (Lee and Wilkins Reference Lee and Wilkins2011, 46).

Studies on the origins of such bureaucratic values tend to provide either dispositional or institutional explanations (Oberfield Reference Oberfield2014). Dispositional approaches refer to the values that public employees bring with them into public service—themselves a result of social experiences and upbringing. The representative bureaucracy approach, for example, argues that the social, racial, or gender background of a public employee affects his or her behavior in the workplace, especially in the treatment of beneficiaries (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2014; Meier Reference Meier1975; Meier and O’Toole Reference Meier and O’Toole2006). Such values may lead to a “self-selection” process through which people with certain ideas or norms apply for jobs in certain bureaucracies. Others studies emphasize that organizational cultures socialize bureaucrats to certain norms after they join public service (DiIulio Reference DiIulio1994). Kaufman’s classic 1960 study about forest rangers in the United States finds that both factors were at work (Kaufman Reference Kaufman2006 [1960]). People with certain values tended to apply for the job, but strong cultural forces within the organization disseminated particular norms and ideas among them. Oberfeld’s more recent work on police and welfare workers (Reference Oberfield2014) comes to similar conclusions.

I propose that activism inside the bureaucracy is a subset of the kind of value-driven behavior these studies have long identified. A small literature on activism inside institutions has come out of both the social movement and the policy literatures. From the latter, Olsson (Reference Olsson2009) and Olsson and Hysing (Reference Olsson and Hysing2012) develop the term inside activist, defined as

This definition focuses on the value-based character of activism, but seems to presume that inside activists participate in civil society networks. Other scholars reject this presumption. Banaszak (Reference Banaszak2010) studies feminist bureaucrats to deconstruct the social movement literature’s presumption that institutionalization results in moderation and demobilization. She finds instead that many women inside the U.S. federal bureaucracy became feminists (or radicalized in their ideas) only after taking government jobs. Pettinichio (Reference Pettinicchio2012) defines “institutional activists” as government insiders who “proactively work on issues that overlap with social movements,” even if movements themselves are not currently mobilized around those issues. He thus also suggests that institutional activists do not necessarily participate in social movement organizations.

In her extensive review of the broader concept of activism, Joyce (Reference Joyce2014) notes that scholars rarely define the term itself. They tend to focus on compound terms, such as women’s activism, environmental activism, and internet activism, thus defining activism in terms of the types of participant, cause, or tactics and tools used, rather than as a type of action. The only consensus, she argues, is that activism involves work in favor of or against changes in the status quo.

Based on these debates, I propose a two-dimensional concept of activism, one that could apply to actors whether or not they are directly involved in social movements. First, activism involves the defense of a particular kind of idea, one that, from the perspective of believers, needs to be defended against powerful forces of either stability or change. Such ideas can be called causes. Being a cause is not an inherent quality of the idea itself, but rather an interpretation produced by actors who believe their ideas to be under threat or in need of defense. Causes are, by definition, contentious, since they are only causes to the extent that there is opposition to them. Activism is thus inherently contentious, even if it does not always involve contentious practices.

Although activists may not participate directly in social movement networks or organizations, their commitments to causes should not be understood as simply individual preferences: they develop out of the same kinds of dispositional, relational, and institutional processes that affect values more broadly. Melucci (Reference Melucci1996) argues that commitments grow out of the experiences people have as they engage in social networks. Fillieule (Reference Fillieule2010) similarly proposes that “militant engagement” evolves from a combination of personal life trajectories, socialization in the organizations to which activists belong, and broader-based social values.Footnote ² Commitment to causes should be understood as a social process, and activist ideas are developed at least partially through the organizations in which activists participate—even if these are public bureaucracies.

A second dimension of activism is rarely mentioned in the literature. As a common-sense term, the word evokes a particularly “active” or “proactive” type of action. To explore this idea, we call on the work of action theorists who propose going beyond the presumption that individuals are either cultural rule followers or individualistic calculators (Sewell Reference Sewell1992; Joas 1998; Emirbayer and Mische Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998). These authors see agency as neither the preordained result of socialization and identity nor somehow breaking with cultural or structural constraints. To the contrary, it is always situated in structures, which serve as the raw material for action (Sewell Reference Sewell1992; Joas 1998). Emirbayer and Mische (Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998) propose a three-dimensional conception of agency, with a rule-following component, a deliberative-evaluative component, and a projective-purposive component. The third component, in which actors consciously strive toward a project they have defined for the future, suggests a more proactive kind of action.

Not all action involves proactively working toward a conception of the future. At the same time, not all proactive action is activist. The rational choice idea that individuals are “maximizers” of their self-interest also has a proactive implication. Individuals in the classic “homo economicus” model are not only selfish but driven to pursue their self-interest at all costs. This “driven” aspect is present in the idea of activism. The drive, however, is not toward the defense of selfish personal interests but toward the defense of causes. Activism thus involves the “pursuit” of causes, or what we might think of as the pursuit of opportunities to defend a cause.

The reference to pursuing opportunities harks back to long debates in the social movement literature on the notion of how opportunities affect movements. In the classic formulation, political changes external to movements influence mobilization (Tilly Reference Tilly1978; Tarrow Reference Tarrow1994, Reference Tarrow, McAdam, McCarthy and Zald1996). Some authors argue that this notion is too deterministic (Goodwin and Jasper Reference Goodwin and Jasper1999; Amenta and Halfmann Reference Amenta, Halfmann, Goodwin and Jasper2012). For this reason, McAdam et al. (Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001) proposed focusing less on opportunities themselves and more on how social movement actors recognize and take advantage of them. Honing in on more microprocesses, the notion of activism suggests a kind of action that involves not just recognizing but also seeking out opportunities. Activists move to new projects and new organizations if the old ones fail to provide opportunities for promoting the cause they care about.

The suggestion that activists are people who do not stay put is evoked in recent research on the Brazilian bureaucracy that has examined the migration of social movement activists into government jobs. This emphasis results from scholarship about the Workers’ Party government, where such migration was fairly common in the early years (D’Araújo Reference D’Araújo2007). A substantial number of studies look at how people with social movement origins influenced policies (Abers et al. Reference Abers, Serafim, Tatagiba, de Castro, Koonings and Wiesebron2014; Abers and Tatagiba Reference Abers, Tatagiba, Rossi and von Bülow2015; Abers and Oliveira Reference Abers and Oliveira2015; Cayres Reference Cayres2015; Dagnino et al. Reference Dagnino, Olvera and Panfichi2006; Feltran Reference Feltran, Dagnino, Olvera and Panfichi2006; Gutiérres Reference Gutierres2015; Rich Reference Rich2013; Serafim Reference Serafim2013; Silva and de Lima Oliveira Reference Silva and de Lima Oliveira2011).Footnote ³

The public employees studied here are similarly engaged in social movement causes, but many of them have no actual connection to movements outside the state. Rather than presume that activists are people with social movement ties, as does much of the literature, this study will show that environmentalists inside the Brazilian government behaved like activists in the two senses just discussed: their action was proactive, involving a pursuit of opportunities; and the object of that action was the defense of a contentious cause—what is known as “socioenvironmentalism”—even when this opposed the demands of their superiors. The remainder of this article will demonstrate how the conceptual framework proposed can guide us in empirical research on bureaucratic actors. First, it will examine the ideas that the bureaucrats interviewed expressed about the Green Grants policy, showing them to qualify as “causes.” Second, it will explore how they acted in defense of those ideas by proactively seeking creative ways to take advantage of opportunities and circumvent obstacles.

Changing Policy Trends Under the PT

When Lula became Brazil’s president in 2003, a wave of enthusiasm swept through social movements and policy communities on the left. The PT was created in 1980 by radical labor unionists, unorthodox leftists, and social movements struggling against the dictatorship that ended in the mid-1980s. During the 1990s, the party gained fame for participatory policies at the local level. On Lula’s election, many social movement activists went to work for the government, seeking to implement their proposals and to strengthen participatory institutions (D’Araújo Reference D’Araújo2007; Abers et al. Reference Abers, Serafim, Tatagiba, de Castro, Koonings and Wiesebron2014). The MMA was no exception. Lula’s first environment minister, Senator Marina Silva, represented a state in the Amazon region and was a close ally of the NGO community working for forest protection. She put many movement leaders in key positions in the MMA (Losekann Reference Losekann2009; Abers and Oliveira Reference Abers and Oliveira2015; Oliveira Reference Oliveira2016).

Yet as many social movements soon found out, the PT era was much more than an opportunity for social movements to influence decisionmaking. Two tendencies marking the PT governments had effects that would be particularly relevant for understanding the case study presented here.

In the first place, during the PT period, accountability agencies gained even more power and autonomy than they had before. Since the 1970s, Brazil’s Public Ministry (MP, for Ministério Público), responsible for suing government in breaches of the public interest, had gained increasing autonomy and power (Arantes Reference Arantes2002). While it was in the opposition, the PT had appealed to the MP to help it fight against the government, and the struggle against corruption and patronage had been central to PT efforts in local government.Footnote ⁴ Lula and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, therefore sought to give the agency more autonomy; for example, by enacting a policy of nominating agency heads chosen by the prosecutors themselves. The strengthening of the MP had innumerable effects, most notably increasing its capacity to investigate corruption, a factor that eventually contributed greatly to investigations that resulted in Rousseff’s impeachment (Arantes Reference Arantes2015).

It also had an affect on the bureaucracy. When the PT took office, agencies responsible for social, health, and environmental policy were staffed almost entirely by temporary employees, hired without clear meritocratic requirements. The MP negotiated an agreement with the Lula administration to create a more stable, meritocratic hiring system. This process, combined with a broader expansion of the federal government, led to the elimination of temporary positions in several ministries and to the creation of 188,000 new civil service jobs throughout the government, an increase of 38 percent (Escola Nacional de Administração Pública 2015).

These processes had major impact on the MMA, which had been populated since its creation, in the 1990s, largely by consultants. In 2005, these jobs were replaced by temporary positions filled through a meritocratic examination. It was a transition process that allowed significant numbers of employees to remain in their jobs, as long as they could pass the exam. After 2008, the government created more than two thousand permanent, exam-based positions that replaced the temporary ones. Some people were able to stay on, but many more newcomers arrived.

A second general tendency during the PT years was the creation of a new paradigm for social policy based on cash transfers. Lula’s flagship social policy was the Programa Bolsa Família (Family Grant Program), a cash transfer program that helped lift millions of Brazil’s poorest families out of extreme poverty. His administration created the Ministry of Social Development (MDS), a highly professionalized bureaucracy that distanced itself from the clientelist traditions of social policy in Brazil. Social movements had little say in the development of this policy or in this ministry.

The MDS developed a sophisticated technology for identifying poor people and getting money to them. It involved the creation of a huge beneficiary database, the CadÚnico (for Cadastro Único, or unified registry). By 2010, the Bolsa Família was the largest cash transfer program in the world, assisting about 12 million families. Recipient families received from about US$22 (R$77) to about US$97 (R$336) a month, depending on the level of poverty and the number of school-age children (Bichir Reference Bichir2012; Paiva et al. Reference Paiva, Falcão, Bartholo, Campello and Neri2013).Footnote ⁵ It became the hallmark policy of the PT federal government.

On taking office in 2011, Dilma Rousseff announced top priority for the Plano Brasil Sem Miséria (Brazil Without Misery Plan), a concentrated effort to eliminate extreme poverty once and for all. This involved increasing grants to the poorest families, instituting an “active search” for those who had not yet made it to the rolls, and promoting a variety of other initiatives. Under the MDS’s command, agencies throughout the government implemented Brasil Sem Miséria programs. These included technical training courses, support for small farmers, and the expansion of basic services, such as electricity, daycare, full-time education, and housing. The Green Grants program would be the MMA’s contribution to this effort.

This was the first time that a major MMA program had been designed without the participation of environmental movements. Close relations between nongovernmental organizations and the MMA had existed since that agency’s creation as a secretariat in 1973 and later as a ministry in 1992. Until the 2000s, with few permanent employees, the agency had relied on the knowledge and capacity of nongovernmental environmentalist organizations to design and implement policies (Hochstetler and Keck Reference Hochstetler and Keck2007). Under Minister Marina Silva, ties to NGOs intensified, as many of their members went to work inside the administration. However, in 2008, halfway through Lula’s second term, Silva broke with the PT, resigned from the ministry, and in 2010 competed with Rousseff for the presidency (Oliveira Reference Oliveira2016).

During the first Rousseff term (2011–14), the relationship with environmentalist movements changed. Minister Isabela Teixeira was a technocrat with close ties to Rousseff. The showcase role of Green Grants under Teixeira suggested that environmental policy had become a supporting actor to the administration’s main protagonist, the effort to eliminate extreme poverty. If tensions between environmentalists and the government had contributed to Marina Silva’s exit while Lula was president, they intensified under Rousseff, as the government invested in big infrastructure, such as the Belo Monte dam, despite devastating environmental impacts (McCormick Reference McCormick2010; Hochstetler and Montero Reference Hochstetler and Montero2013; Abers et al. Reference Abers, de Oliveira and Pereira2017). People connected to the NGO community slowly left the ministry, either because they followed Silva, they disagreed with ministry policies, or they believed that the new administration was pushing them out (interviews 1–8, 2013). Abers and Oliveira (Reference Abers and Oliveira2015) show that over the course of the decade after 2003, the number of upper- and middle-echelon appointees in the ministry with connections to social movements or NGOs slowly declined. They were largely replaced by permanent public servants.

In sum, the Ministry of Environment, historically dominated by activists from the environmental community, had become a professionalized bureaucracy, almost entirely under the command of civil service bureaucrats. One of its top-priority policies was eliminating poverty, with less emphasis on environmental protection. This situation, to a certain extent, reflected the broader spirit of the first Rousseff administration: more technocratic, less influenced by social movement demands, with a clear priority to combat poverty. What is surprising is that the bureaucrats who ran antipoverty programs in the MMA advocated for the environmental cause, an action that put them in conflict with a minister whose main concern in the implementation of the Green Grants program was putting as many people on the cash transfer rolls as possible.

The Cause: Socioenvironmentalism

In a meeting early in the first Rousseff term, a commission responsible for designing the Brasil Sem Miséria plan asked MMA officials to identify the social group that was most likely to live in extreme poverty. The answer was obvious: “traditional peoples and communities” (interview 18). The term referred to local rural communities with roots in particular places and certain kinds of productive practices. Of particular interest were the so-called extractivists: communities dependent on the sustainable collection of products such as brazil nuts, fruits, and rubber, to be found in the native forest. Brazil’s rubber tappers poignantly embodied this concept. When land grabbers seeking to expand ranching in the Amazon tried to expel them from their lands in the 1980s, an international movement grew up to support their movement, intensified by the assassination of their leader, Chico Mendes, in 1988 (Hochstetler and Keck Reference Hochstetler and Keck2007; Keck Reference Keck1995).

Through these experiences, the MMA began to develop a particular agency culture, which was largely dominated by what is known in Brazil as socioenvironmentalism (interview 1; Hochstetler and Keck Reference Hochstetler and Keck2007). This approach opposes itself to so-called conservationist traditions that focus on top-down regulations and the creation of protected areas untouched by human activities. Instead, socioenvironmentalism proposes that environmental protection requires coexistence with human communities.

In the 1990s, most MMA programs were influenced by socioenvironmentalist ideas. One focus was the creation of “extractivist reserves,” conservation units to protect economic activities, such as rubber tapping, that rely on sustainable resource use. The ministry also had programs for promoting sustainable farming practices adapted to the Amazon, such as agroforestry systems. The common thread was the idea that communities themselves should participate in policymaking at all levels (Abers et al. Reference Abers, von Bülow, Little and Millikan2000).

By the late 1990s, Amazonian social movements and NGO leaders began to speak of the forest protection work conducted by these populations as “environmental services,” although policy efforts in this direction were timid. Under Marina Silva, for example, a program designed in close collaboration with Amazonian organizations included a fund that would pay rural families for environmental services. The program, however, failed to get off the ground (Mattos 2011), as did most programs that worked with traditional populations (interview 1). Although considered by many to be a sort of headquarters for policies targeting these groups (interviews 6, 8, 9, and 25), programs for them had a hard time gaining higher-level political traction. The socioenvironmental project thus had a sort of “embattled” character to it, with the ministry in opposition to the central government.

The Green Grants Program

The Green Grants program provided families living in extreme poverty whose economic activities contributed to protecting standing forests a bonus of 100 Brazilian reais monthly (USD $29), in addition to their regular cash transfer. The government initially proposed a target of 73,000 beneficiary families by mid-2012, but soon moved the deadline to December 2014, the end of Rousseff’s first term. It would be the first MMA program benefiting traditional peoples to be considered a presidential priority.

Three groups were eligible for receiving the grants. First, the program included the residents of extractivist reserves. The Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBIO)—an agency subordinated to the MMA that manages Brazil’s national protected areas—administers 59 Extractivist Reserves, almost entirely in the Amazon region (ICMBIO 2014). By September 2014, about 22,000 families living in these areas were receiving Green Grants (MMA 2014).

Second, the program targeted land reform settlements administered by the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). That agency’s Green Settlements program had already mapped 74 settlements with high levels of poverty and particularly low levels of deforestation. These would be among the first areas included in the program (interview 22). Land reform beneficiaries became the largest contingent of Green Grant recipients, about 41,000 families in September 2014 (MMA 2014).

Third, the Secretariat of National Patrimony (SPU) in the Ministry of Planning administered floodlands in the Amazon—considered federal patrimony because all waterways in Brazil are public domain. It had a program to guarantee usufruct rights to traditional fishing populations living in those territories. This group accounted for about 5,900 of the program’s families by September 2014 (MMA 2014).

Implementation through so many agencies, each with its own method of defining potential beneficiaries, was a complicated task, as figure 1 suggests. Reaching people living in such distant regions was also daunting. To receive a Green Grant, families had to jump through a series of hoops. First, they had to live in one of the protected areas or settlements that the program prioritized. A satellite study had to demonstrate that the area had adequate forest coverage. Second, the families had to be officially recognized residents of those areas. That required being on a list of one of the implementing agencies, whose understaffed field offices often had great difficulty monitoring the populations in their territories.

Source: Elaborated by the author based on interviews and program documentation.

Figure 1. Organizational Chart of the Green Grants Program

Third, residents had to be recipients of Bolsa Família. This required being included in the CadÚnico registry run by the Ministry of Social Development. Municipal governments, whose offices were often located hundreds of kilometers from the protected areas or settlements where the families resided, were responsible for including families on this list. In the poorest parts of Brazil, these governments were also likely to be sparsely staffed and underfunded.

Fourth, the family had to be classified in the “extreme poverty” category. This depended only on the “self-declaration” of the household head. Finally, the household head had to sign a formal document that outlined program rules and regulations. This required that an official visit the family, explain the policy, and get a signature. This could mean days of boat travel by fieldworkers to homes in the most remote regions of the Amazon. All of this happened through an intricate process of interagency coordination.

Opportunities and Obstacles: The Work of Green Grants Bureaucrats

To understand how bureaucrats act, it is important to identify how their working conditions provide obstacles and opportunities for action. The focus here will be on the middle-level workers located in Brasília, who designed program details in negotiation with superiors and who coordinated field personnel. The Brazilian federal government classifies appointees into seven levels, with ministers at the seventh level. Of the 17 Green Grants bureaucrats interviewed, 3 had level 5 appointments (that is, two steps below the minister), 6 had level 4 appointments, 1 had a level 3 appointment. All but one of these appointees were permanent bureaucrats. Six were public servants without political appointments, and 1 had been hired on a temporary contract.

In the MMA, the sector responsible for Green Grants had five technical employees called “environmental analysts” and a few interns, supervised by a level 4 appointee. During the research period, three different civil servants occupied this coordinating post (all of whom were interviewed). In the Ministry of Social Development, three workers were closely involved in the program: a level 5 appointee, responsible for rural social programs; a level 4 appointee, who worked with databases; and an assistant. No employee was exclusively dedicated to the Green Grants program. These bureaucrats were in constant contact with the MMA staff.

The three agencies responsible for implementation had offices in Brasília, where officials coordinated the work of field personnel. A level 5 appointee at ICMBIO ran the Department of Socioenvironmental Programs and Territorial Consolidation. Under him, a level 4 appointee was responsible for programs involving traditional populations. A level 3 appointee was the only person exclusively responsible for Green Grants. She described her job as almost entirely dedicated to organizing the flow of information between the agency’s central offices and the protected areas where beneficiaries lived. At INCRA, Green Grants was one of several programs in the General Coordination for the Environment—not even the most important one, according to the coordinator, a level 4 appointee. Under him, only two administrative employees helped with the program. The smaller program at the SPU was run by a level 4 employee, working alone on Green Grants and other activities.

The employees at the MMA and of the Ministry of Social Development designed and coordinated the program in close collaboration. The Steering Committee that officially governed the program began to meet regularly only in 2013. Before then, key decisions were hashed out in “situation rooms,” high-priority meetings charged with finding solutions to implementation problems. These meetings were a major modus operandi of the Rousseff administration. The personnel at Social Development were experts at putting pressure on the agencies they worked with through these meetings. The Green Grants team at the MMA worked hard to prepare for them, and middle-echelon personnel negotiated directly to defend the proposals they designed.

It was through these arenas, as well as informal conversations between technical personnel and middle managers and between middle- and upper-level managers, that the actors defined strategies for reaching beneficiaries. There was plenty of funding. Indeed, as one bureaucrat told me, “A priori, in the Brasil Sem Miséria program, we do not have budgetary problems” (interview 18). Yet lower-level personnel spoke bitterly about how difficult it was to dig themselves out of the pile of paperwork. This was especially true for those in the three implementing agencies.

Several workers noted that they felt obliged to resist constant pressure from the coordinating agencies to increase the numbers. “The MMA has the role of designing the policy and to make demands on us, and we try to put on the brakes” (interview 22). For one staff member, it was not so much his lack of influence in the decisionmaking structure but a broader structural limitation.

In sum, three characteristics of work in the Green Grants program combined to influence what bureaucrats seeking to promote environmentalism could do. First, they were under tremendous pressure to increase the number of program beneficiaries, almost at all costs. Second, the fact that the program had high priority meant that there were more resources available related to this program than was common for environmental policies. Third, program coordinators adopted participatory procedures, allowing technical personnel to present their opinions and debate policy design. This is the context in which the bureaucrats interviewed sought opportunities for change.

Contentious Ideas

A first step in identifying whether bureaucrats are activists is to find out what ideas they defend, if any. Of the 17 Green Grants employees interviewed, only 4 did not express clear environmentalist commitments. Three were Ministry of Social Development staff. Although they recognized the importance of protecting the environment, they were clearly more interested in bringing cash transfers to remote populations. The other was an MMA “environmental analyst” who, despite having similar qualifications and formal status to other interviewees, saw herself as primarily an administrator.

The remainder described their work as part of a longer life story in which they had developed commitments to environmental causes through different kinds of social experiences. Importantly for our proposition that activism does not require membership in social movement organizations, these commitments did not necessarily grow out of participation in civil society networks. Six interviewees had previous experience in social movement organizations or NGOs: one had fought for the creation of a protected area in his home region, another had been a lawyer for land reform activists, another had worked with indigenous groups, and so on. The majority, however, said that their interest in environmentalism emerged in college or graduate school, largely because they studied fields such as biology or environmental management. In general, as with Kaufmann’s 1960 forest rangers, considerable self-selection was at work.

Although interviewees rarely spoke specifically about how their notions of environmentalism changed after working in government, the ideas they defended clearly resonated with the socioenvironmental approach dominant in the ministry. In fact, the only interviewee who presented a more “conservationist” perspective worked for the Planning Ministry. He strongly defended the importance of strict monitoring of deforestation. The employees at the MMA, ICMBIO, and the land agency, INCRA, were more clearly concerned with empowering local communities as part of the environmentalist project. They praised the program for bringing cash transfers to hitherto invisible social groups that their agencies had long defended. Yet they also viewed cash transfers to a portion of families as a far cry from the community-based approaches that socioenvironmentalism called for.

For some, the effort to meet the ambitious target diverted resources from activities that would guarantee that families actually understood their commitments and had the means to fulfill them. This would require more investment in training and technical assistance. For others, just sending money to these families was not enough: without better access to social policies, they tended to abandon their sustainable lifestyles. Furthermore, many wondered if restricting the program to people in extreme poverty was fruitful. By supporting one neighbor and passing over others, the program created tensions in local communities and a sense of injustice. One interviewee suggested that by privileging the very poor, the policy might even be counterproductive, since it excluded families who were more successful at sustainable economic production (interview 17).

In sum, most of the workers interviewed held strong beliefs about the need to change policy priorities. These ideas can be understood as of the “cause” variety, since they were defended in terms of an opposition to strong adversaries, in this case a government that prioritized economic development and poverty reduction over not just environmentalism but a socioenvironmental approach.

Taking Advantage of Opportunities

Activism involves not just action around causes but a particular mode of action: the proactive pursuit of opportunities. The bureaucrats studied here actively sought to change policy in favor of the socioenvironmental cause.

One important initiative was a training program for beneficiaries. A staff member at the MMA worked with a friend at the British Embassy to obtain support for the Green Grants program (interview 23). The result was an effort that took place entirely outside the government, though designed by middle-level bureaucrats at the MMA. The embassy provided funding to an NGO that specialized in training courses for traditional communities; the NGO embarked on a two-year program that taught field personnel and municipal employees to be Green Grants instructors. The initiative can be understood as an effort by MMA employees to put the program in the service of the longstanding “traditional communities” agenda.

Another major step forward, according to several interviewees, was a rural technical assistance program specifically for Green Grants recipients. This effort involved drawing on an already existing program run by the Ministry of Agrarian Development that funded competitive grants for agronomists and other professionals to assist small farmers. In 2014, bureaucrats from the Ministries of Agrarian Development, Social Development, and the Environment helped design the first competition directed toward providing technical assistance for extractivists (interviews 22 and 23). According to the INCRA official responsible for Green Grants, this rural assistance initiative was much more important than the program itself. After a long career fighting deforestation in land reform settlements, this bureaucrat saw the technical assistance program as key to supporting that cause.

Interviewees at ICMBIO told me how they convinced the Ministry of Social Development to allocate funds from Brasil Sem Miséria to pay for a broad-based study of households living in extractivist reserves. Conducting such a study had always been on ICMBIO’s agenda, but had never moved forward. The study, one interviewee said, would help ICMBIO better design policy and programs for those families, above and beyond the cash transfer program. The idea became a pet project of the program director at ICMBIO, who threw himself into negotiating with the Ministry of Social Development to fund it. The money allowed ICMBIO to hire a university team to organize a much more systematic household study than the agency had been able to conduct on its own (interviews 16 and 17).

These ideas had three things in common. First, they sought to go beyond the “quantitative” component of the program. Training courses, technical assistance, and a detailed study of extractivist families would allow the program to reach deeper into the lives of beneficiaries, not only providing cash but also building capacity for environmentally sustainable production and access to a broader range of government programs. They thus pushed the program toward the socioenvironmentalist agenda.

Second, they creatively interconnected actors and organizations in new ways. The program allowed bureaucrats to mobilize resources from one government agency to help another (such as Brasil Sem Miséria funding for technical assistance and a household survey). They also made connections outside the government, such as between an embassy and an NGO. These initiatives were not individual activities but rather collective actions.

Third, they sought to improve not only Green Grants but also other programs implemented by the agencies involved. As one interviewee noted, “We started to see Green Grants as a policy that induces other policies” (interview 22). Funding for technical assistance for extractivists supported a broader effort by the INCRA staffer to create “sustainable settlements.” The study of extractivist households would provide information to support other ICMBIO policies. Many of the people interviewed seemed to invest in Green Grants because they saw it as a way to leverage resources toward other projects and programs they worked on. In this sense, actors not only sought to find opportunities to make Green Grants “greener,” they also saw the program itself as an opportunity to strengthen other environmental programs to which they were more deeply committed. Their activism around the Green Grants program was motivated by commitments built over longer professional and organizational histories.

Dealing with Changing Opportunities

The bureaucrats interviewed not only worked to transform program design in ways that promoted their own ideas about what government should be doing, they also sought to guarantee those changes over time. The need to do so became clear in late 2014, when extremely close elections first put the continuity of the Rousseff presidency in doubt. I conducted a second round of interviews in October 2014, just before runoff elections for president that many thought Rousseff’s adversary would win (he did not).

Uncertain of the policy’s future, an MMA interviewee told me that the staff was working hard on two fronts. First, they wanted to meet the target of 73,000. “It is a question of honor for us. The staff needs to be able to say that they did it” (interview 23). Second, the staff was “trying to leave its mark.” Even if the current president left, she noted, the new government would need quickly to put together a four-year budget plan, and hopefully Green Grants would be in it. The group was engaged in collectively writing a report summarizing lessons learned and recommending changes. They wanted to simplify the process of registering beneficiaries. This would shore up resources that could be going to the training and technical assistance efforts. They also proposed increasing the beneficiary public to include anyone under the poverty line, and not just extreme poverty, so that entire communities could be included. Another project was to design a larger training program for extractivists. The staff’s concern was to get this document written and approved by higher-ups before the end of the government, to give it some legitimacy.

A year later, I conducted a few more interviews to see what happened. Rousseff had narrowly won the election and had initiated a new term in 2015, making no major changes in the MMA. At the time of these interviews, most people (incorrectly) presumed that the new government would survive Rousseff’s second four-year term. Brazil was in deep recession, and funding was short. A new secretary of extractivism and sustainable rural development told me that the priority was now improving program quality rather than continued quantitative increases. This included many of the initiatives cited earlier. Both the technical assistance project and the training program were in development, and the ICMBIO household study was complete. The technical report had never been signed by the upper echelon, but it did inform the new leadership of the program, hired over the course of 2015 (interviews 24, 25, and 26). In sum, it would seem that by reducing pressure to expand the program, the fiscal crisis created room for the activists’ proposals to flourish.

These advances occurred despite a major turnover in the Green Grant staff at the MMA. Almost everyone interviewed earlier left the program in early 2015, after a series of conflicts. According to two interviewees from the original team (interviewed for a second time later that year), problems began after a change in coordination. Soon after the original coordinator left, the program’s Steering Committee made a draconian decision to summarily remove families from the rolls if satellite images showed deforestation on their lands. The proposal went uncontested because staff members were, for the first time, not allowed to participate in the meeting (interview 24). One of the people who left the program told me that the new coordinator was uninterested in hearing out more experienced employees; for example, refusing to take into consideration a study she had written. She expressed deep anger and frustration at what she interpreted as disrespect for her qualifications (interview 27).

The unpopular coordinator, however, did not last long. A new secretary took over and brought in a person who had worked closely with rubber tappers’ organizations. According to the new coordinator, those organizations were enthusiastic about getting more involved in the program, now that its focus would be less on increasing numbers and more on improving capacities. Yet by then, most of the people who had helped build the program had moved on. The story, as we leave it, thus ends on a dubious note. On the one hand, the program was looking more and more like a socioenvironmental program, with a focus not just on cash transfers but on empowering extractivists and small farmer communities to protect forests. On the other hand, many of those who had defended those proposals had left. Those I was able to speak to told me that they did so largely because they no longer believed that they could make a difference. They preferred to try their luck elsewhere.