Data for: Presidential decrees and statutory legislation in the making and dismantling of Brazilian environmental policy

The paper analyzes the use of presidential decrees and statutory legislation in Brazilian forestry policies, focusing on the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm). Drawing on documental sources and semistructured interviews, the paper answers (1) why some instruments of PPCDAm became law and others were enacted by decree and (2) how design choices impacted the policy’s resilience against dismantling. The two main data collection techniques employed were documental research, and semi-structured interviews. In April 2022 I spent two days in Ibama’s library located in the agency’s headquarters in Brasília. There I consulted nearly 600 pages of non-classified institutional documents, which mainly include (i) pedagogical plans, books, and handouts used in the training of new servants; (ii) internal restructuration reports; (iii) inspection manuals oriented to the agents; and (iv) notes to draft revisions of inspection manuals. This primary dataset obtained in Ibama’s archive was complemented with materials available online, such as (v) statutes, decrees, laws, executive orders, and administrative acts concerning Ibama’s competence of inspection; (vi) annual management reports; (vii) yearly budgetary provisions; (viii) pleadings and transcriptions of public hearings in complaints of unconstitutionality; (ix) public examinations for the admission of Ibama servants and their corresponding calls; (x) open letters written by Ibama’s servants and their professional association, Ascema Nacional; (xi) interviews given by Ibama’s inspection agents to the press; and (xii) social media content published by and/or about Ibama’s servants. Public statements on the agency by politicians complete the documental dataset analyzed. From October 2021 to May 2022 I conducted 42 semi-structured interviews with current and former Ibama servants and executive leaders (12), actors working in other state institutions involved in the implementation of PPCDAm (8), federal prosecutors (4), NGO representatives (2), and agribusiness actors (16). Some were made online, some were made in person from March to April 2022 in the capital Brasília and the cities of Araguaína, in the state of Tocantins, and Redenção, in the state of Pará. The interviews were recorded upon explicit authorization of the interviewees and transcribed with the help of the software Trint. The software alleviated only around 30% of the transcription workload, the bulk of the recordings still had to be manually transcribed. Approximately 60 hours of recording were converted into nearly 700 pages of transcriptions. Each interview took an average of 1 hour and 20 minutes. In addition to the interviews, 2 other cattle ranchers responded to my questions in writing. Any type of information that could lead to the personal identification of the interviewees was anonymized. Individual names, names of farms, biographical information (e.g. educational and professional background, city of origin, career trajectory), specific events in which the person was involved, were all either omitted or presented in more aggregated, generic formulations. The selection of interviewees followed a snowball sampling.