Developed in the context of COP 30 in Belém, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) was presented as a promise to usher in a new paradigm for forest financing, proposing to remunerate countries with tropical forests for the direct conservation of every hectare of preserved forest – as verified by satellite – rather than using a metric based on carbon credits. Its financial structure brings together US$125 billion, comprising ‘junior’ capital, contributed by donor countries and philanthropic organisations, and ‘senior’ capital, raised from private investors in the international bond market. Since the TFFF was established, the World Bank has been the manager of this fund, acting as its trustee and interim host of its secretariat. However, as it emerges as the latest institutional initiative for global climate governance, the TFFF is not immune to the tensions inherent in any attempt to reconcile the urgency of the ecological crisis with the imperatives of capital appreciation. This research examines the financial and institutional architecture of the TFFF, seeking also to understand the World Bank’s role as the fund’s manager, viewing the institution as one of the main champions of green capitalism, with the aim of converting standing forests into financial assets and subjecting their conservation to the logic of market profitability.

The urgency of the energy transition in the face of climate change is driving the search for innovation in clean technologies. In this context, whilst Brazil has historically relied on a renewable energy mix, China has established itself as a global economic power and the world’s largest absolute emitter of greenhouse gases, whilst also being at the technological forefront of the renewable energy sector. Brazil-China cooperation in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) takes on greater significance in this context. This dissertation seeks to understand whether China’s approach is guided by the horizontal model of South-South cooperation, promoting local endogenous capacity-building, or whether it reproduces the asymmetrical North-South dynamic, perpetuating Brazil’s dependence on technology imports and primary commodity exports.

In the early 1990s, as a result of growing international concern over socio-environmental issues, the UN recognised that Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are “particularly vulnerable” to climate change and face specific challenges in achieving sustainable development. Since the Second World Conference on the Environment, held in Geneva in 1990, most SIDS have been participating in international negotiations through the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). This study aims to analyse the role of this diplomatic coalition within the international climate regime.

The aim of this research is to analyse the formulation and implementation of the third Lula administration’s climate foreign policy, identifying areas of support and opposition in the country’s foreign policy regarding climate change. The research draws on the theoretical framework that foreign policy is a form of public policy with domestic distributive effects, linked to the political economy of foreign policy, in order to understand how Brazil operates at the COPs. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE) interacts with domestic preferences (on the part of other public administration bodies and civil society groups) regarding Brazil’s climate foreign policy; how different conceptions of development are perceived and utilised by this bureaucracy, given its developmentalist legacy; and, finally, how the disputes arising from these different conceptions are resolved and translated into Brazil’s actions in international climate negotiations.

This thesis analyses the contradiction between Brazil’s role as a protector of the Amazon rainforest and its role as a promoter of a water-, land- and carbon-intensive agricultural export model. The study shows how domestic political economy, the global market and the climate agenda shaped the obstruction practiced by Brazilian transnational corporations between 2002 and 2022. The agri-food sector adopts strategies to ensure the continuity of its business operations, legitimised by the rhetorical invocation of food security and development. Methodologically, anchored in Grounded Theory, the research applies a qualitative coding tree to documents and interviews. In doing so, it maps multi-level corporate tactics, ranging from multilateral arenas to local governance, revealing the climate-related obstacles.

This dissertation analyses the strategic ambiguity of Brazilian energy policy, characterised by the contradiction between the pursuit of an international leadership role on climate issues and the domestic expansion of fossil fuel extraction. The study critically evaluates models from the Global North (such as ACF, Transition Management and Carbon Lock-in), highlighting their limitations in the face of the specific characteristics of the Geopolitical South, such as the cumulative addition of energy sources, the central role of the state and territorial conflicts. Adopting a qualitative and theoretical-analytical approach, the research aims to lay the foundations for the construction of a framework tailored to the Brazilian context, one that addresses the dilemma of decarbonisation, distributional disputes and strategies of obstruction and climate ‘postponement’ within the national energy sector.