Entre ideias e mudanças: o Big Push para a sustentabilidade e o caso do fórum da geração ecológica

Abstract

Established in 2021 by the Environment Committee (CMA) of the Brazilian Federal Senate, the Ecological Generation Forum brought together specialists to draft legislative proposals aimed at sustainable development, concluding its activities in 2022 with a final report containing twenty-six bills. This study analyzes the process of creation and development of the Forum as a case of institutional change, seeking to understand how the Big Push for Sustainability, disseminated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), influenced this process. Campbell's (2004) approach to the role of ideas in institutional change is adopted as the theoretical framework, in dialogue with the literature on international diffusion and International Organizations (IOs). Methodologically, this is a single qualitative case study, with data collected through semi-structured interviews with two key actors and documentary analysis of primary institutional sources. The results indicate that the Forum constitutes a case of evolutionary institutional change, in which the international paradigm of sustainable development, consolidated by the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), was regionally translated by ECLAC into the Big Push, and diffused into the Brazilian domestic context through discursive dissemination, technical assistance, and the opening of spaces for dialogue, with the agency of an institutional entrepreneur. This diffusion materialized into transformations in the cultural-cognitive and regulative dimensions of the CMA, consolidated in the legislative framework presented in the Forum's final report.