The term sustainable development has become a catch phrase of the 1990s, a handy slogan for politicians, bureaucrats, environmental activists, multinational aid officials, and even business leaders. Implementing sustainable development policy, however, is no mere technical problem. Indeed, environmental policy making is classically political: a competition among multiple interests with differing goals, resources, tactics, information, and time horizons. Who “sustains” what, for whom, why, and how? These questions underpin any analysis of the politics of environmental policy.

Scholars have paid little attention to the political side of environmental policy making in developing countries. Although environmental policy making is often understood as a case of “diffusion,” in which ideas flowed from Western Europe and the United States to the developing world, the acceptance of new ideas is always mediated by local institutions and cultures (Sikkink, 1991). Furthermore, as international linkages have come to involve more and more actors outside foreign ministries, the form of diffusion differs from classic examples like social security policy (Collier and Messick, 1975).

To what extent has the North American Free Trade Agreement contributed to strengthening and deepening international environmental management in the Americas? Should the system be broadened to incorporate other nations? While a complete answer to these queries is currently beyond reach, there should be little doubt that NAFTA has influenced and continues to influence the direction of environmental management in North America and the hemisphere at large. The agreement has spawned a series of new institutions that are already reshaping current practices and that have considerable promise for broadening the range of international commitments to environmental management in the Americas. The most prominent and most relevant of these is the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

How does a country's transition to democracy affect the state? This question is of great importance, given the crucial role that the state has played in the economic, social, and political development of most countries affected by the “third wave” of democratization. Yet this topic has received insufficient scholarly attention. Indeed, definitional assumptions may make this question appear a non-issue: because the state is regarded as more permanent than a political regime, which can change with disturbing frequency, democratic transitions are often assumed to leave the state unchanged. Latin America's “politicized states” (Chalmers, 1977; Power, 1991), however, lack institutional stability. Given the fluidity of state structures in the region, democratization may have a profound effect on the state. It may help institutionalize the state and make it more autonomous from established social forces, or, by contrast, it may further corrode the internal unity and undermine the strength of the state. Because the state has assumed an enormously wide range of responsibilities in Brazil, this country constitutes an especially good case for analysis.

In May 1996 Brazil's National Confederation of Industry (CNI) convened a meeting of industrialists in Brasilia for a mass show of unity and focused lobbying in favor of constitutional reform. Industrialists large and small heeded the call. Nearly three thousand of them from all over Brazil chartered planes and packed shuttles. Fortified by a morning of speeches demanding constitutional reforms, the industrialists fanned out over Brasilia in the afternoon to argue their case to members of the national congress. As if to demonstrate that it could not be intimidated, however, Congress chose that very afternoon to vote down a reform proposal backed by business. By the end of that year, it was clear that business had made little progress in pushing several amendments it supported.