Blame Games in the Amazon: Environmental Crises and the Emergence of a Transparency Regime in Brazil

In 1992, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development recognized in its tenth principle the right of “each individual [for] appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities.”¹ Since then, numerous policy papers by the United Nations, donor countries, and NGOs have called for increased transparency and accountability in environmental governance.² The rising salience of environmental transparency regimes is evident in the level of attention (and politicization) of this topic in the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as seen in the clash between the USA and China during the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen (COP15) and recent debates on monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) concerning the reduction of emissions from avoided deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). As a result, questions concerning the emergence of environmental transparency regimes (i.e., the creation of monitoring systems and the validation...