The making, mobility, and mutation of the “Amazonian bioeconomy” in Brazil: A processualist analysis of an emergent economic imaginary

This thesis contributes to theoretical debates around the stability and change of sociotechnical and political economic orders through an empirical, qualitative study of the making, mobilisation, and mutation of the “Amazonian bioeconomy” (AB) in Brazil. The AB is an emergent economic imaginary that seeks to reconcile economic growth with tropical forest conservation in the Brazilian Amazon. I scrutinise the AB through Cultural Political Economy (CPE), which allows me to complicate both proponents’ promissory claims and critical scholars’ fatalistic analyses of this imaginary. In turn, by bringing CPE to the Brazilian Amazon, I expand its empirical basis, and supplement it with original analytic tools assembled from science and technology studies, historical geography, and critical development studies. The thesis develops a processualist framework for scrutinising emergent imaginaries in a way that both deflates and explains the hype around putatively novel ideas while simultaneously shedding light on their invariably incomplete instantiation. It does so by attending to processes through which imaginaries are envisioned, infrastructured, emplaced, and politicised. By deploying this framework to make sense of the AB, my analysis brings into relief the multi-sited, uneven participation of a wide range of actors who are shaping this imaginary. This allows me to stress the possibility of politics latent within AB and foreground instances when diversely positioned actors have in fact managed to weave their own agendas into it. Overall, I argue that despite the AB’s colonial, neoliberal, and technocratic underpinnings, it is an ambivalent, multi-stranded imaginary whose outcomes remain underdetermined. Chapter 1 situates the research questions animating this thesis in relation to the theoretical traditions and empirical insights from relevant bodies of scholarship. Chapter 2 outlines the methodological approach I took in collecting and processing my data. Chapter 3 provides a brief historical overview of the contexts in which AB proponents operate and situates the proliferation of Brazilian bioeconomy imaginaries in a period of overlapping, compounding national crises. Chapter 4 traces a genealogy of how prominent scientists came to put the AB on the map of Brazilian development thinking. Chapter 5 examines how actors across the public and private sectors in the state of Amazonas are building the conceptual and institutional infrastructures they consider to be foundational for the AB. Chapter 6 explores the efforts of an international aid agency and a local NGO to emplace an AB initiative in forest-dwelling communities along the Madeira River. Chapter 7 traces the reception and contestation of the AB among Traditional and Indigenous groups and analyses how they repurpose it to further their own territorial and educational projects. Chapter 8 recapitulates the conclusions of the preceding chapters and further articulates the methodological and theoretical contributions of the thesis.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Cabrera Rocha, Emiliano

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Radcliffe, Sarah

• geographies of knowledge
• cultural political economy
• STS
• economic imaginaries
• sociotechnical imaginaries
• infrastructure
• development
• politics
• governance

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/df1df4eb-1f96-40c7-a5ac-b0b8ce12caf5/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122404

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/391189