Analysis of narratives against the environmental approaches and policies of the Brazilian and Colombian governments.

With the arrival of leftist governments in Colombia and Brazil, the discourse on the environment took a 180-degree turn, positioning the current presidents as world leaders on the issue. One consequence has been that several opposition voices have used these environmental discourses as cannon fodder to criticize broader public policies, to call attention to inconsistencies and hypocrisies they perceive in the speeches, or to attack their officials.

The objective of this monitoring is to identify the characteristics of the discourses based on the approaches and public policies proposed by these governments, with emphasis on the predominant narratives and arguments of the voices that criticize the environmentalist agenda in X (Twitter) since the inauguration of each president -August 2022 for Colombia and January 2023 for Brazil- until August 2023 in both cases. For each country, the publications with the most interactions were analyzed, as well as a random sample of tweets.

First, we describe the size and peaks of the conversation in X during the period studied to identify the milestones that have driven it. Then, we describe the main approaches made to environmental issues in Colombia and Brazil. We define this as a starting point to identify the counter narratives that are analyzed in the third section. The text ends with a series of conclusions and recommendations for the work of civil society.