Description
Environmental governance has become a key dimension of global agri-food chains, shaping the expansion of commodity frontiers. In Brazil, soybean production illustrates how farmers operate within a dense web of overlapping rules and sustainability initiatives - from the Forest Code and the Soy Moratorium to corporate protocols and the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). While most analyses focus on downstream actors such as traders and NGOs, this paper shifts attention to farmers, examining how they interpret, negotiate, and sometimes reconfigure environmental norms in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on a mixed-methods approach - including bibliographic and documentary research, secondary data, and 67 interviews in four rapidly expanding soy regions - the study explores the everyday politics of compliance and the territorialised practices through which producers engage with multiple governance frameworks. Findings reveal diverse strategies of adherence, adaptation, and circumvention, reflecting regional contexts, local enforcement capacities, and political-economic alliances. Farmers emerge not as passive rule-takers but as active agents who shape governance from below, generating ambiguities and flexibilities within hybrid regulatory regimes. By foregrounding these practices, the paper contributes to debates on sustainability governance and commodity frontiers, arguing that compliance, contestation, and circumvention are not marginal deviations but constitutive elements of how environmental governance operates in frontier regions.
