The crisis as an opportunity: mineral lobby strategies against environmental standards

Abstract

The interconnections between Law, State, and Power are widely studied in various theoretical fields. In this article, we investigate the strategies of incidence of the mining sector on the state agency, aiming to observe its influence on reducing the normative level of sector regulation and environmental protection in the country. It is argued that the mining sector has been using periods of economic and social crisis to stimulate and accelerate processes of flexibilization of environmental protection norms, treated as obstacles to the paradigm of development anchored in economic reprimarization. The temporal scope considers the incidences used during the pandemic period as a window to visualize the problem. The investigation is qualitative in nature, conducting literature review, documentary analysis, and clipping in four national portals, handling and organizing primary data to systematize the analysis axes. In the results, it is observed that there is an anti-environmentalism that manifests itself in four distinct lobbying strategies: i) fostering public officials to propagate the expansion of the mining sector; ii) promoting events where the defense of socio-environmental deregulation was mentioned as a measure to attract economic investments; iii) normative initiatives to deregulate socio-environmental protection in legal and infralegal scope; iv) management alignment initiatives to favor mineral expansion through public agencies. The articulation between these axes reveals an impoverishment of the pluralism of interests represented in the public sphere, since the business discourse tends to expand and colonize public debate from the perspective of private interests.