UC Berkeley

The title of this dissertation is "Examining and Supporting Agricultural Interventions to Reduce Deforestation in Brazil." It is a collection of three research chapters. Each is a case study that stands alone and directly complements the other cases. Chapter One examines the international politics of targeting agriculture to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and how the ideas, approaches, and insights of an epistemic community of scholars has helped to frame the debate. Chapter Two explores whether in the absence of decisive multilateral actions, Brazil can effectively protect its forests without indirectly harming those of the rest of the globe. Chapter Three examines scientific, regulatory, and enforcement elements to reduce the risks of implementing a policy like the one I examine in Chapter Two. Taken together, these cases provide a cross section of normative, theoretical, empirical, regulatory, and political dimensions of emerging efforts to intervene in agriculture to prevent deforestation. Insights from each chapter and from the broader dissertation are intended to inform governance of the land use change process and to contribute to environmental social science scholarship that examines and informs these efforts.