Transitions, Plural

A transition is a displacement–the passage from one state to another. The 21st century chose its own displacements and announced them repeatedly, in international agreements, in targets and in national commitments: a cooler planet, a more equitable society, an economy aligned with nature. Announcing the destination, however, is not the same as traveling the road, and it is on the road that the displacements cease to be one. They multiply, acquire different rhythms, and begin to compete for territory, for capital, and for political attention.

Belém made the question visible. With the Paris Rulebook complete and the first Global Stocktake concluded, COP30 marked the passage from a phase in which the main task was to build the regime to the era of implementation. The new cycle has analytical consequences, and not merely diplomatic and geopolitical ones. While the problem was to negotiate rules, the object of study was multilateralism itself: who concedes, who blocks, what consensus manages to produce. Once the problem becomes implementation, the object moves inside economies, territories and productive systems, where decisions are not taken by parties to a convention but by ministries, regulatory agencies, development banks, firms and farmers.

This shift gives meaning to the theme of this issue of CEBRI-Journal. Responding to climate change has ceased to be an environmental agenda and has become a set of simultaneous transitions in energy, in productive structure, in land use, and in the organization of work. Speaking of transitions in the plural is not an invitation to complexity nor a gesture towards comprehensiveness. It is the recognition that these processes have their own rhythms, coalitions and scales, and that treating them as a single agenda, or as parallel agendas that do not speak to one another, produces policy error. Simultaneity is not an editorial framing. It is the condition under which these transitions are being conducted.

The term polycrisis gained currency to name what the 2020s made hard to ignore: crises once treated as sequential began to occur at the same time and to feed on one another. Pandemic, supply chain disruption, energy and food shocks, inflation, indebtedness, trade and geopolitical fragmentation, eroding trust in institutions. None of them is environmental in origin, all of them alter the room for maneuver of any climate policy, and the response to one alters the conditions for responding to the rest. In Brazil, this condition is sharper for a specific reason. The country holds, within a single territory, the largest tropical forest in the world, agriculture on a global scale, a predominantly renewable power mix, rising oil production, reserves of the minerals the global transition demands, and persistent inequality. Each of these positions is an asset in one agenda and a liability in another. Here, the transitions cannot be sequenced for later: the choices each requires bear upon the same hectares, the same budgets, the same institutions and the same populations. This is why interdependence, in this editor’s note, is a working hypothesis, with consequences that can be verified across the articles gathered here.

WHY TURN TO THE FIELD OF TRANSITIONS

Researchers have devoted at least two decades to this question. The field of sustainability transitions emerged at the turn of the 2000s, chiefly in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, from an uncomfortable observation: climate change, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity would not be resolved by incremental adjustments to the systems that produce energy, food, mobility and housing. The systems themselves would have to change, not merely improve.

What the field offers to those who work with public policy is a vocabulary for thinking about structural change without lapsing into either technological determinism or voluntarism. Regime denotes the dominant configuration of technologies, rules, infrastructure, contracts, markets and habits that makes a way of producing hard to abandon, even when a better alternative exists. Niche is the protected space where an alternative matures before facing full competition. Landscape identifies long-term pressures, such as demography, geopolitics and the climate itself, which no one controls and which open or close windows for change. A transition occurs when landscape pressures destabilize the regime and allow mature niches to take its place. Over the past two decades, the field has come to treat power and conflict as central variables, to study how a consolidated arrangement is dismantled and who pays for it, and to look at the systems that deliver goods and services to people: energy, the built environment, transport and food account for roughly 90% of everything the economy extracts from nature.

The field also has limits, and the principal lies in its origins. Its repertoire was formed from rather specific cases: the decline of coal in the United Kingdom, the electrification of mobility, and domestic heating in Europe. In all of them, transition means substituting one dominant technology for another within the same provisioning system, and the governance challenge is to weaken the dominant arrangement. This is a reasonable description of industrialized economies whose emissions come from burning fossil fuels and whose land-use problem was settled, or rather consummated, centuries ago. The agenda the field itself calls the geography of transitions has been pointing to this spatial blind spot for a decade.

A further discussion runs between transition and transformation, and it is not a semantic one. The transitions literature grew out of the study of socio-technical systems and asks how to steer change from one regime to another. The transformation literature comes from socio-ecological systems, political ecology and development studies, and asks who decides what is transformed, for whose benefit, and what must be undone so that something new can take hold. Where the first sees a coordination problem, the second sees a power problem. Not by chance, much of this second strand was formulated from the Global South, where environmental change rarely presents itself as the orderly substitution of technologies and almost always as conflict over land, labor and authority.

For the Brazilian case, neither vocabulary, on its own, captures what is at stake. Treating land use as a socio-technical regime to be replaced underestimates the conflict over property and power that sustains it. Treating it only as a transformation to be desired sets aside the question of instruments, sequencing and financing, which is where Brazil has built capacity. Not by chance, the COP30 Presidency named the central decision taken in Belém with a word that does not belong to the repertoire of transition management: mutirão denotes voluntary collective effort, not a steered process.

In Brazil, this repertoire entered through the door of energy, mobilized to explain the apparent slowness of a country with a comparatively clean power mix, a modest share of wind and solar, and a historical dependence on hydropower. Beyond energy, its use is scattered and almost always sectoral, which reproduces here the very trait the international field has been trying to correct: each transition has acquired its own technical community, its reference ministry, its regulatory framework and its funding source, and none has to answer for what the others intend to do in the same territory. Yet Brazilian reality is not organized that way. Here the transitions neither follow one another nor run in parallel. They meet, and they meet on the same physical base.

WHERE THE TRANSITIONS MEET

The articles gathered in this issue, written independently and from different disciplines, describe points of encounter worth stating together.

The first is land. Agriculture and forest protection have been contesting this space for three decades, and the present decade has added two new claims, both justified by the climate. Restoration needs area to recover native vegetation. The energy transition needs area by two routes: the mineral one, whose claims now overlap 370,000 square kilometers of intact forest, the largest overlap of its kind anywhere in the world; and the bioenergy one, in which agricultural biofuel competes for arable land with food production while forest biomass competes directly with standing forest. One landscape, four incompatible uses, and the same justification invoked by all of them.

The second is water. Standing forest is not only a carbon stock, but also hydrological infrastructure. Flying rivers link the Amazon canopy to the rainfall that sustains the Cerrado, and a uniform 25% decline in forest cover within a 50-kilometer radius raises maximum air temperature by between 0.50 °C and 0.95 °C, a magnitude comparable to deforestation on the site itself. This means that agricultural productivity and hydropower generation, the backbone of the Brazilian power mix, depend on a variable produced by forest policy. Brazil's energy transition has an input that does not lie in the power sector.

The third is productive structure. Clean electricity is the country's principal asset in the contest for low-carbon industry, and it depends on that same hydrology. At the same time, the minerals the global transition demands lie beneath the forest that sustains them. And the capacity to capture value along this chain depends on innovation and manufacturing, not on resource endowment: between 2000 and 2024, the ten largest economies accounted for nearly 90% of international patent applications in solar and wind energy, while Brazil, sixth in the world in installed wind capacity, accounted for 0.4% of global wind patents and 0.19% of solar ones.

The fourth is labor. Every choice made at the three preceding points of encounter defines occupations, skills and income in specific territories, and none is distributively neutral. This is why just transition, framed as a problem of compensating the losers of decarbonization, has been shifting towards benefit sharing. It is not enough to offer financing for a transition that, in the Global South, means exporting ore and importing technology.

The conclusion that follows is one method, and it is the central argument of this issue. These relations are not co-benefits. A co-benefit describes an additional gain that a policy produces outside its stated objective, a bonus to be celebrated when it appears and whose absence does not invalidate the policy. What the articles describe is something else: they are dependencies. If forest policy fails, the rain fails, and with it the harvest and the reservoir. If mineral policy advances without territorial criteria, it destroys the basis of forest policy. If industrial policy does not build domestic linkages, clean electricity becomes a cheap input for value realized outside the country. In an arrangement of co-benefits, the failure of one part is a disappointment. In an arrangement of dependencies, the failure of one part disseminates to the rest. Brazilian public policy is still designed for the first case.

And these dependencies are being fixed now. Brazil is in what the authors in this issue call the mid-transition: the targets have already been set, the structures that will meet them have not yet consolidated, and every decision on infrastructure, regulation or technological route locks in options for decades. Early in such a process, a wrong choice can be corrected by the next one. In the middle, it cannot.

There is a further element running through the articles, one the authors confront without having agreed to do so: the effect is produced at one scale, and the decision is taken and paid for at another. A consensus regime among 194 countries produces binding decisions and needs faster coalitions to carry them out. The climate a farm experiences is produced within a radius of tens of kilometers, yet land-use policy scores, pays and penalizes at the property or the State level. Restoration produces two distinct goods: one global, fungible and tradable; the other local and without a market. These are different situations with the same structure–the scale at which the effect is produced is not the scale at which decisions are taken and paid for. The agenda that matters for the coming decade may not be one of instruments, of which the country has plenty, but one of coupling across levels.

WHAT REMAINS OPEN

This issue does not settle the question of where the agricultural, forest, mineral and energy pathways converge. It deliberately preserves productive tensions among the contributions. Acknowledging this is not an argument against transition. It is a condition for transition to work. Real transitions involve distributive conflict, choice under uncertainty and competing priorities, and the greater risk lies in treating them as a technical process. The articles in this issue have been arranged to make those tensions visible, not to dissolve them.

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