Description
This article draws from the Multispecies Justice framework to explore whether multispecies principles have been employed in Brazil’s 2025 Plano Nacional de Desenvolvimento da Bioeconomia. Despite Brazil's assured stance in global bioeconomy leadership and the unparalleled biological wealth of its Amazonian territories, scholars, policymakers, and civil society actors have yet to engage with the implications of this new model of sustainable economic development for justice between human and non-human beings. Previous research has continuously shown how sustainability language is instrumentalised in public policy, but its employment in national bioeconomy governance plans considering the misrecognition of nonhuman rights has barely been taken up in literature. Nevertheless, MSJ offers a valuable matrix for interpreting the PNDBio’s instrumental ontology of life in contrast with the relational practices of the Amazonian sociobioeconomy. This paper shows that the PNDBio strategically appropriates the term sociobioeconomy without necessarily aligning with Indigenous and rural communities’ values or making genuine efforts to address intersecting, more-than-human calamities and injustice. This research is a theory-informed critical discourse analysis of a public policy document. It concludes that Brazil’s national bioeconomy reshapes human-nonhuman relationships based on a rationale of economic valuation of life.