Predatory Growth Machines: Precarity, Patronage and Predatory Elites in Amazonian Deforestation

• In Event: 30410 - Environmental Inequalities

Abstract

Sociological theories have addressed the causes of environmental degradation and the social movements that challenge it (Rudel, Roberts, and Carmin 2011). Influential ‘growth machine’ and ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ theories suggest that environmentally degrading economic growth is unstable and amenable to local counter-movements (Molotch 1976; Bunker 1984; Rudel 2009; Dietz, Shwom, and Whitley 2020). This paper theorizes ‘predatory growth machines’—elite coalitions that capture local government, dominate civil society, and prevent counter-movements in resource frontiers. Based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Amazonian deforestation frontiers, I identify local social and political factors that promote deforestation—a distinctly sociological contribution to ‘land use’ scholarship hitherto focused on economic, demographic, and environmental drivers (Hänggli et al. 2023; Geist and Lambin 2002). Quantitative political analysis found that electoral competition and government hiring positively correlate with deforestation (Pailler 2018; Xu 2022). With long-term ethnography across electoral cycles, national policy changes, and commodity market fluctuations, I identify a robust set of sociopolitical mechanisms that promoted deforestation in 2012-2022. I find that rural Amazonians’ precarious economic and institutional conditions propel predatory economies and widespread clientelism. Rural dwellers resort to elite patronage for essential public services and everyday problem-solving. Predatory rural elites capture local governments, circumvent environmental policies, mobilize people against environmental organizations, suppress forest-friendly projects, and coerce environmental leaders and counter-movements.

Author

• Gabriel Locke Suchodolski, Georgetown University