Federal Government Agenda and Executive-Legislative Relations: The Executive's and Congressional Agenda Powers on Environmental Policies

• Grant number: 25/01534-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Public Policies
• Principal Investigator: Felipe Gonçalves Brasil
• Grantee: Laura Castanho Teruel
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/07485-3 - Dynamic attention and agenda-setting in Brazil (Brazilian Policy Agendas Project), AP.JP

Abstract

This master's project aims to analyze and compare the power of the Executive and Legislative agenda on federal environmental policy, and seeks to understand the impact of current power dynamics for such area, as well as the impact on the balance of power between Executive and Legislative. The aim is to answer the following questions: "How do the Executive and the Legislative use their agenda power to interfere in environmental policy?" ; "How has the increase in the power of the Legislative Branch over the Executive Branch's agenda impacted environmental policy?" ;"How does the level of environmental rigor of the propositions behave over time in each Power?" and finally, "The Legislature has been acting more anti-environmental than the Executive?". For this, laws and normative acts of the two powers will be analyzed and compared regarding legislatures contained in the period from 1995 to 2025. To map the agenda of the Executive, will be used documents: PECs, Constitutional Amendments, Provisional Measures, Presidential Decrees, Bills and Laws approved on the initiative of the president. To map the decision agenda of the Legislative of the same period, will be used the Bills proposed by this power, the Constitutional Amendments initiated by the Congress or the Senate, and the laws approved by one of the Houses. The agenda literature will guide the understanding of the space that environmental issues have been occupying in the government agenda. The literature of Political Science will be evoked for the analysis of the Legislative Executive Relations as environmental policies. The need for the study starts from the recognition that in recent legislatures, the Congress has been deliberating and approving a series of laws and normative acts of low environmental rigor, representing the interests of thematic groups with high bargaining power, leading to legislative and sub-legal setbacks. At the same time - and also as a consequence of these power dynamics around environmental policy -, Brazil and the world have been witnessing environmental disasters that show the course that climate change has taken. In addition to the current context that makes the environmental agenda one of the main public problems of the country, in recent years, environmental policies have been a good example for analyzing the relations between one power and another and the agenda of the two powers. Increasingly, we can see the intense action of coalitions with different agendas that aim to approve certain projects and block others. Although, within the same power, there may be coalitions with conflicting environmental agendas, the propositions and approvals coming from each as a whole are important indicators for mapping the trends coming from each power. In addition, it should also be considered the scarce production of studies that compare the power of the Executive and the Legislative agenda with respect to environmental policy. Therefore, the project aims to map, analyze and compare the two agenda powers in quantitative terms (quantifying the approvals coming from each), and in qualitative terms, by classifying the data on an environmental rigor scale. From this, the following specific objectives will also be achieved: I) identify which of the two powers had more agenda power on environmental policies in each of the legislatures analyzed; II) reflect on the evolution and trends of the relationship betweenLegislative with respect to environmental policies; III) classify the laws and normative acts of the two branches of government according to their environmental rigor, on a scale from 0 to 6; IV) determine and compare the dominance rates and success rates of the President and the Legislature in relation to the PLs, Laws, PECs and Constitutional Amendments in relation to environmental policy. ) From the previous steps, describe how the environmental agenda power of each of the two powers (to rewind or strengthen the area) was used in each legislature.