Making Law Matter

Environmental Protection and Legal Institutions in Brazil

Lesley K. McAllister

• Publisher: Stanford Law Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804783101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto ambientale

Although many developing countries have environmental statutes, regulations, and resolutions on the books, these laws are rarely enforced and often ignored. Making Law Matter presents the first book-length treatment of an innovative prosecutorial institution, the Brazilian Ministrio Publico, which refashioned itself in the 1980s into a powerful defender of citizen rights in environmental protection, as well as in other areas of public interest such as disability rights, consumer protection, and anticorruption.

In Brazil, the offices of prosecutors and courts have become an important forum for resolving environmental conflicts, making environmental law more effective than in the past. Court involvement communicates the end of impunity for violators. It increases the accountability of governmental agencies and provides legal access for citizen complaints. In short, it enhances environmental rule of law. As developing countries continue to seek to reform their legal systems to strengthen democracy and the rule of law, the Brazilian Ministrio Publico must be recognized as a very promising model.

1

Environmental Protection and the Rule of Law

THE STORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW in developing countries is often a story of laws that fail to achieve their stated goals. Forestry laws guarantee preservation of rainforests while massive deforestation occurs. Clean water laws set forth rigorous standards as cities and factories dump untreated waste into rivers and streams. Constitutions grandly proclaim that a balanced ecological environment is assured to all citizens while cities grow uncontrollably into unlivable megacities.

Environmental law in developing countries is also often a story of failed regulatory agencies. The regulatory agencies that are charged with implementing and enforcing environmental laws are chronically underfunded and understaffed. Agency salaries tend to be low, and corruption is a constant concern. Regulatory approaches for pollution control and natural resource management that succeed in developed countries seem inadequate or unworkable. Environmental agencies in developing countries often do not have the capacity to implement and enforce the most basic and essential components of environmental law.

The existence of rigorous environmental protection laws and inadequate regulatory agencies, however, creates an opening for a new type of player in environmental protection: legal actors. Courts may be called upon to enforce laws in legal actions against entities that cause environmental harm, and possibly even against the governmental agencies responsible for regulating them. In countries as diverse as India, Kenya, and Colombia, environmentalists have had their day in court. And in response to environmental claims, courts in many developing countries have become increasingly active in the implementation and enforcement of environmental laws.

In the 1980s, Brazil’s very independent prosecutors were empowered to file environmental enforcement actions against private actors as well as the government. From the state of São Paulo in the industrialized south to the state of Pará in the Amazonian north, public prosecutors began receiving public complaints about environmental problems, opening investigations, and filing civil and criminal actions for environmental harm. Prosecutors assumed this role based on a widespread perception that environmental laws and environmental agencies were failing. With a growing number of environmental cases in their dockets filed by prosecutors, Brazilian judges also became important actors in environmental protection.

This book tells an atypical story about environmental law in a developing country. It tells the story of how the involvement of legal actors in environmental protection in Brazil made environmental law more effective. It finds that the involvement of legal institutions—particularly prosecutors and courts—helped develop a robust, effective environmental regulatory system in Brazil. Legal institutions brought a degree of legal fidelity and sanctioning power that environmental regulatory agencies lacked, and prosecution of environmental cases worked to dispel the longstanding notion of impunity for environmental harm. Moreover, Brazilian legal actors adapted to their new role in environmental enforcement—they developed knowledge of environmental law and mechanisms to resolve environmental cases efficiently and effectively. Brazil stands as a model of how developing countries can empower their legal institutions to act in ways that make environmental law matter.

Environmental Regulation in Developing Countries

Environmental problems have significant political salience, and reforms to legal and institutional mandates in many countries have reflected this significance. Like Brazil, most Latin American countries have written the right to a healthy environment into their national constitutions. They have also created substantial environmental legal frameworks, with laws requiring the use of environmental impact studies, the establishment of air and water quality standards, the protection of natural areas, and other environmental protection policies. Environmental regulatory agencies now exist in most national and subnational jurisdictions.

Environmental regulation refers to the set of rules developed by regulatory agencies to implement environmental laws.¹ The common wisdom is that environmental regulation in developing countries often does not work.² As documented by the World Bank (2000: 1–2), regulators are often unable to enforce pollution standards at factories and there is “widespread recognition that traditional pollution regulation is inappropriate for many developing countries.” Relatively little empirical research, however, has been done about the operation of environmental regulation in developing countries. Why are regulatory institutions in developing countries unable to enforce discharge standards at factories? What is it about developing countries that makes traditional pollution regulation inappropriate?

Environmental regulation fails in developing countries for many reasons. Often, the proximate cause involves the limited capacity of regulatory agencies (see Nef 1995; Mumme 1998).³ Regulatory agencies may lack staff, or the staff may be inadequately trained or equipped. They may not have the technical expertise to develop appropriate standards and conduct effective inspections. Agency staff may also be poorly paid, creating conditions for corruption. Often, environmental agencies are the poor relations among governmental agencies, and they are subject to interference by elected officials and more powerful agencies, particularly agencies responsible for economic development. As Brazilians say, environmental agencies frequently lack the “political will” to implement and enforce environmental laws (Findley 1988: 5).

More fundamentally, environmental regulation fails because of the mismatch in political strength between interests that oppose environmental regulation and interests that favor it. The targets of regulation tend to be organized and powerful while the societal beneficiaries of regulation tend to be diffuse and weak. Regulated entities may simply ignore their legal obligations, or they may develop strategic behaviors that enable them to avoid regulation, such as using their political connections to influence particular agency decisions or prevent environmental agencies from growing stronger (see Mueller 2006: 2).

The beneficiaries of environmental law—individual citizens and society as a whole—are often not knowledgeable about the law and their legal rights. They do not expect the law to be enforced and have little ability to affect the regulatory enforcement process. They are also likely to be more willing to trade off environmental quality for economic growth than their counterparts in developed countries (ibid.: 3). In most developing countries, environmentalists are not numerous or organized enough to form a political constituency sufficient to make environmental regulation a priority.

While sometimes blamed, the inadequacy or incompleteness of legal texts is usually a symptom rather than a cause of environmental regulatory failure. In Brazil and in most other developing countries, the characteristics of legal texts offer only a superficial explanation for the ineffectiveness of environmental regulation. Indeed, quite often, environmental laws in developing countries look very good on paper. Such environmental laws may be merely symbolic, passed to satisfy some political interests but never truly intended to be implemented and enforced (Edelman 1964; Dwyer 1990). As Brazilian experts frequently noted, Brazil’s laws were among the most rigorous and complete in the world, but they lacked compliance (see Guimarães, MacDowell, and Demajorovic 1996). Where effective regulatory agencies and political support for environmental protection are present, textual deficiencies are likely to be corrected or rendered unimportant.

It is easy for a developing country to enact environmental legislation that looks a lot like the law of rich countries. The hard part is making those laws work, and often it does not happen. Promising routes toward enforcement that succeed in the difficult context of a developing country are needed. This book shows how the involvement of prosecutors and courts in environmental enforcement may supplement and reinforce weak environmental agencies and societal organizations in ways that lead to greater environmental protection in the challenging context of a developing country.

Prosecutorial Enforcement in Brazil

Brazilian public prosecutors became significant actors in the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in the 1980s. Brazilian prosecutors are members of the Ministério Público, literally translated as the Public Ministry, but more usefully translated as the “public prosecution service,” or simply the “procuracy” (see Voigt 2006: 4).⁴ The Brazilian procuracy consists of a state Ministério Público in each of Brazil’s twenty-six states as well as representatives of the Federal Ministério Público in each state. Under the 1988 Federal Constitution, the Ministério Público is an independent branch of government empowered to defend environmental interests and other “diffuse and collective interests” (interesses difusos e coletivos) as well as carry out its more traditional prosecutorial activities in the area of criminal law.⁵ State and federal prosecutors fulfill their environmental mandate by conducting investigations and filing lawsuits to impose liability for environmental harm. This work of the Brazilian Ministério Público, herein called “prosecutorial enforcement,” emerged as a new mode of enforcing environmental law—an alternative to the administrative enforcement conducted by environmental agencies.⁶

Throughout Brazil, most significant environmental cases are brought to the courts by public prosecutors. One of the earliest environmental cases filed by prosecutors concerned the twenty-four petrochemical and steel companies that constituted Brazil’s largest industrial district, Cubatão. In 1986, São Paulo state prosecutors sued them for $800 million dollars’ worth of harm to nearby forests, soils, and waters. In 2001, São Paulo prosecutors sued to force the Shell Company of Brazil to evacuate residents and purchase the properties neighboring a facility where improperly disposed industrial wastes had contaminated soils and groundwater. These are just a couple of examples; between 1986 and 2001, São Paulo state prosecutors filed over three thousand civil lawsuits alleging environmental harm.

While prosecutors first became involved in environmental enforcement in the state of São Paulo in the 1980s, prosecutorial activity diffused to other states in the 1990s and became the dominant mode of environmental enforcement throughout the country. In the Amazonian state of Pará, lawsuits brought by federal and state prosecutors halted the construction of an interstate shipping canal and a major hydroelectric plant, both of which were priority infrastructure projects for the state government. Between 1998 and 2002, federal prosecutors in Pará also filed a series of criminal and civil suits against loggers as well as federal environmental agency officials that exposed corruption and fraud in the harvest and sale of mahogany. The caseload of federal prosecutors in Pará is indicative of the priority placed on environmental prosecution: in 2001, over half of civil cases and about one-third of criminal cases concerned environmental harm.

There are over ten thousand federal and state prosecutors in Brazil, and the majority are empowered to civilly or criminally enforce environmental laws. Of these prosecutors, a handful in each of Brazil’s twenty-six states—perhaps a hundred in total—work exclusively in the area of environmental protection. These specialized prosecutors are generally stationed in the capital cities of their state. Some of them work directly on environmental enforcement cases while others staff an office that assists unspecialized prosecutors throughout the state with investigating and filing environmental claims. Brazilian prosecutors are often graduates of the country’s best law schools, selected through competitive civil service exams. They have a reputation for being smart and idealistic. Environmental prosecutors often view themselves as public advocates waging battle against greedy or careless businesses and corrupt governmental officials.

The involvement of prosecutors in investigating and filing environmental claims, in combination with the decisions of the judges who hear these cases, has propelled environmental law to a high level of visibility and significance in Brazil. This book shows how, with the active involvement of Brazilian prosecutors, both private and public actors relevant to environmental enforcement began to take environmental law more seriously. Individuals and private organizations, including those that seemed immune to administrative sanctions, began to worry about their compliance. Environmental agency officials became more attentive to the law and more resistant to corruption. Citizens concerned about environmental problems started using the law to challenge the actions of others, including the government itself. In these ways, prosecutorial enforcement contributed to the construction of a legal culture that supports and strengthens environmental law. Environmental law became law that mattered, law that people considered in their everyday decisions and actions.

The Procuracy in Comparative Perspective

Procuracies in developing countries have been the focus of little scholarly attention. Much has been written about the wave of judicial reform that has swept through Latin America, but very little about parallel reforms of prosecutorial institutions (Kapiszewski and Taylor 2006). Many have talked about the increase in judicial power in the region, but few about the growing power of public prosecutors. While the powers of Brazil’s procuracy have perhaps expanded most dramatically, the procuracies of many other Latin American countries have also grown in their responsibilities and public profile (Duce and Riego 2006).

The substantial literature about public prosecutors in the United States provides a useful starting point for comparing procuracies across national contexts. A persistent theme in this literature regards the “largely uncontrolled” and “essentially unreviewable” discretionary power exercised by U.S. prosecutors (LaFave 1970: 532; Vorenberg 1981: 1523). The prevalence of plea bargaining in the United States raises particular concerns about the lack of prosecutorial accountability (see Lynch 1997; Remington 1993). Some reformers have promoted the development of internal policy that would make prosecutorial screening and decision making more transparent and consistent (Abrams 1971; Wright and Miller 2002). Others have advocated the external control of prosecutors by, for example, making the rules of administrative law applicable to prosecutorial actions (Davis 1969; Vorenberg 1981; Lynch 1997).

While calls for reform that would reduce discretionary power have generally not been heeded, recent research on U.S. prosecutors has revealed broad changes in how prosecutors approach their work. In the traditional model, the prosecutor’s main goal was “to ensure the efficient and effective prosecution of cases presented to them,” generally felony cases investigated and presented by the police (Coles and Kelling 1998: 32). In the new “community prosecution” model, the prosecutor’s goals include reducing and preventing all types of crime, including low-level disorder and misdemeanor offenses that affect the quality of life in their communities. Prosecutors adopt a problem-solving approach and collaborate to a greater extent with civic groups and other governmental agencies (ibid.: 5; Levine 2005: 1127).

While U.S. prosecutors have long been regarded as powerful social actors, the same is not true of their Latin American counterparts. Traditionally, the Ministério Público in Latin American countries played relatively marginal roles in both criminal prosecution and civil litigation (see Duce and Riego 2006: 17–18). In criminal prosecution, prosecutors may have been formally responsible for charging an offender, but the act of charging was not a discretionary decision, and the police and judges were tasked with most of the important decisions involving investigation and case disposition.⁷ In civil litigation, prosecutorial duties included representing weak parties such as minors and incompetents and drafting nonbinding legal opinions for judges to consider in their decisions. In some countries, the Ministério Público was abolished because of its lack of importance (Hammergren 1998: 35; Duce and Riego 2006: 18).

In the past two decades, however, almost all Latin American procuracies have undergone reforms as their criminal justice systems have adopted features of the accusatory (or adversary) model. Across the continent, prosecutors gained new powers in the investigation and processing of criminal cases (Duce and Riego 2006: 20). In Brazil, prosecutors also became extremely active in civil litigation involving public interests such as consumer defense, children’s rights, disability rights, and worker health and safety as well as environmenta...