In Brazil’s soybean agribusiness, corporate environmental governance initiatives – such as certifications, agreements, and corporate partnerships –promise to make supply chains more “sustainable”, emerging in response to criticisms that link commodity production to various environmental problems. A growing body of social sciences literature underscores the need for approaches that account for the complexity of actors, practices, and technologies in agro-food chains, emphasizing that the production of information has become a new form of government. Corporate environmental governance in Brazil’s soybean supply chain activates various norms, metrics, and public reporting methods to showcase companies’ environmental performance, resulting in multiple ways of performing what the key current environmental issues are and defining what constitutes “sustainability”. Understanding how these corporate environmental governance arrangements operate within the soybean supply chain, the specific conceptions of “sustainability” they promote, and how disputes over environmental governance practices are shaped within the agro-food sector is therefore crucial.

Participants (Center)

TEMAS/UFRGS: Alessandra Lamana Waschburger, ngela Camana, Marília Luz David