Eve Z. Bratman is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College.

Winner of the APSA Science, Technology & Environmental Politics Section's Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize

"Finally, almost three decades after Rio92 introduced the world to 'sustainable development,' we have a book that explores not just the successes or failures of this paradigm, but which also reveals the fraught, uneven, and ultimately compromised work done in its name. Bratman's vivid account of how well-intended land-use policies often reproduce the very conditions of destruction and immiseration they seek to address is a timely invitation to reimagine the transformational potential of sustainable development." -- Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon

"Eve Bratman has produced a powerful, readable account of what 'sustainable development' has meant for the lives of people in the Brazilian Amazon. At a time when the machinery of international development has reduced the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to a supposedly settled politics of program implementation, Bratman's profoundly unsettling account is welcome. It reminds us that goals become what governing processes make of them." -- Ken Conca, American University

"This book will help you understand why current president Jair Bolsanaro could completely divert Amazonian development away from any ideas linked to sustainability into deforestating monocultures of soy and grass." -- Susanna Hecht, University of California, Los Angeles

"Eve Bratman's penetrating case studies from the Brazilian Amazon reveal sustainable development as a multi-sited, conflict-ridden process whose policy implementation and discursive practices largely serve to accessorize, rather than attenuate, state encroachments, capital expansion, and regional imbalance of power. A must-read for students of environmental politics and international development." -- Seth W. Garfield, University of Texas at Austin