Policy Window or Symbolic Inclusion?

Environmental Racism and the Climate Agenda in Belém at COP30

Abstract

Climate justice has race, gender, class, and territory. In Brazil, the hosting of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém, Pará, exposed a structural tension between global sustainability rhetoric and local practices of racial exclusion, a phenomenon the authors identify as the “Belém paradox.” This article investigates how the fight against environmental racism ascended to Brazil's governmental and international decision agenda, using COP 30 as a strategic window of opportunity within John Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework. The study employs a qualitative, documentary, and bibliographic methodology, articulating Kingdon's analytical model with Henri Acselrad's concepts of environmental justice and political ecology. The empirical base comprises official COP 30 documents, civil society reports by organizations such as Geledés, Dhesca Brasil and Instituto Pólis, and independent investigative journalism. A racialized and intersectional methodological approach is applied throughout, foregrounding race as the primary axis of analysis. Results indicate that the coupling of the three streams during COP 30 produced unprecedented discursive gains, most notably the historic inclusion of the term “Afro-descendants” in UNFCCC final documents such as the Global Goal on Adaptation and the Belém Declaration on Combating Environmental Racism. However, the analysis also reveals that urban infrastructure works carried out in preparation for the event deepened environmental racism in Black and traditional communities, including Vila da Barca and Quilombo Abacatal. The article concludes that, although COP 30 successfully elevated racial climate justice to the international decision agenda, the persistence of a colonial urbanization model in Belém underscores that discursive progress alone cannot guarantee substantive policy implementation.