Brazil's return to electoral democracy during the 1980s, after 20 years of military rule, brought a new emphasis on the importance of active popular engagement in politics. Inspired by the emergence of a wide array of social movements, activists and scholars hoped that a new ethic of participation would take hold that could transform a country known for clientelism and conservative stability. Both of these books deal in some way with this theme, placing the current democratic period within a broader historical perspective and evaluating the extent of change in recent decades. Beyond this general focus on political engagement, they differ sharply, both in terms of their empirical concerns and the extent and character of their theoretical ambitions.

In Greening Brazil, Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck have written an engaging overview of environmentalism in Brazil. The rise of environmental concerns in this country is often viewed simply as a reflection of the green movement in the developed world and, in particular, as the alarmed discovery of rapid deforestation in the Amazon during the late 1980s. Although they acknowledge the importance of international factors, the authors demonstrate that Brazilian environmentalism also has domestic roots, and they analyze in a highly nuanced fashion how its diffusion has been shaped by the particularities of the country, in terms of institutions, processes of political change, ideologies, and national security concerns.

Hochstetler and Keck eschew the common practice of focusing on either mobilization at the societal level or policymaking within the state, insisting that the environmental movement spans the state–society divide. Instead, they strive to identify “the constellation of linkages that sustain or undermine a particular policy or set of policies, both inside and outside government, and the mechanism through which this process occurs” (p. 225). Individuals are critical to these linkages, and as they tell the story of Brazilian environmentalism, the authors introduce us to a series of activists who have at some times led organizations in civil society and at others served as legislators or bureaucrats at the local, state, or national level.

Hochstetler and Keck highlight the impact of three broad aspects of Brazilian politics: democratization, federalism, and the pronounced gap between formal institutions and actual practices. The transition to democracy energized civil society, and the environmental movement was part of that impressive wave of grassroots organizing and protest. Although protest activity tailed off in the late 1980s, the transition period left its mark in terms of organizations, individual leaders, and a tendency to link environmentalism to concerns about social equity. Brazil's federal system divides responsibility for the environment among different levels of government and, given the country's deep regional differences, produces wide variation in the extent and character of environmental protection. In discussing the role of informal political processes in Brazil, the authors seek to underscore that the creation of a favorable law or regulation by no means guarantees that it will be implemented. The need to struggle for effective implementation of policies, they argue convincingly, makes the networks linking civil society and the state especially important.

Greening Brazil is organized into a combination of historical and thematic chapters. Chapter 1 examines the development of environmental policymaking institutions at the national level, as well as key aspects of the policymaking process. Chapters 2 and 3 track the evolution of environmentalism in Brazil from the 1950s to the present. Chapters 4 and 5 consist of case studies of particular regions and issues: The first examines the struggle for the preservation of the Amazon, while the second focuses on pollution in the state of São Paulo.

The limitations of the book lie mainly in its use of theory. The authors introduce and usefully deploy a few general concepts, but do not engage in a sustained dialogue with any body of theoretical work. This omission may be a logical product of their unconventional strategy of focusing on mobilization and policy simultaneously, but there are times when it seems like a missed opportunity. For example, they repeatedly stress the impact of dramatic events, especially assassinations of prominent activists and deadly industrial accidents, in pushing forward environmental activism and policymaking. This argument could potentially be linked to important concepts in both the policy and social movement literatures (e.g., “policy windows,” “issue-attention cycles,” “framing processes”), but the authors forgo making any such connections. Nevertheless, they have written a highly readable and empirically rich study that reflects their intimate knowledge of Brazil, environmental issues, and the dynamics of activism. It will undoubtedly be of interest to Brazilianists and students of both social movements and environmental politics.

Anthropologist James Holston's Insurgent Citizenship is a bigger book than Greening Brazil in terms of both its length and the scope of its theoretical claims. Based on a combination of ethnographic and historical research, it advances some broad arguments about the character of citizenship in Brazil. It makes the case that Brazilian citizenship combines a formal inclusiveness in terms of accepting individuals as part of the Brazilian nation, while distributing specific rights (both political and social) in a highly unequal way. Holston contrasts this “inclusively inegalitarian” citizenship with the French and American versions, which, he says, have had more difficulty (especially in the latter case) incorporating marginal groups, but have been characterized by a stronger impetus toward the eradication of inequalities among those deemed citizens.

At the same time, Holston argues that the character of Brazilian citizenship has been transformed in recent decades with the emergence of a more inclusive and assertive “insurgent citizenship” rooted in the poor peripheries of Brazil's cities, including São Paulo, where his field research was carried out. Rather than industrial workers or Catholic activists (the usual heroes of democratic transition analyses), its key protagonists are people seeking to build homes, legitimate their claims to urban land, and obtain needed services, like water and electricity. This new brand of citizenship has not displaced the old one, but it has disrupted and destabilized it.

Holston develops these arguments in four sections. The first lays out the basic theoretical framework and arguments. The second looks at the historical foundations of Brazilian citizenship, including chapters on the incorporation of marginal groups at independence, the evolution of suffrage, the strategies used by elites to limit popular ownership of land, and the unequal distribution of social rights. The third section looks at the emergence of a new urban citizenship. One chapter discusses how popular sectors have increasingly made use of elite strategies for manipulating Brazil's dysfunctional legal system to legitimize their landholdings, while a second examines broader aspects of “insurgent” citizenship, including the expanding understanding of rights among lower class people. The final section analyzes the “disjunctions” caused by the clash of older and newer conceptions of citizenship, as manifest in the increasing incivility of everyday social relations, the injustices perpetrated by the legal system, and the ironically rights-based discourse of violent gangs.

This is not a conceptually neat book, and some readers may be frustrated with its ambiguities. In particular, Holston's definition of citizenship as not only formal membership in the polity but “the substantive distribution of rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails” (p. 7) is so broad and flexible that it is hard to be sure where its boundaries lie. Its ambiguity allows him to shift the emphasis of his empirical analysis from the extension of rights by the state (in the historical section) to the perception and exercise of those rights by ordinary Brazilians (in the section on the new urban citizenship) without any explanation. The author also makes some controversial assertions that would seem to require more evidence than he provides, including his suggestion that those struggling for home ownership have articulated the demand for a new democratic citizenship with greater “force and originality” than labor unions or political parties (p. 313).

These problems notwithstanding, Insurgent Citizenship makes a number of valuable contributions to the scholarship on Brazil and, in particular, on Brazilian land rights. Its detailed analysis of land ownership claims in one São Paulo neighborhood is especially illuminating, demonstrating how, over time, fraudulent claims have accumulated one on top of the other, so that it is almost impossible to identify a legitimate owner to many tracts of land. Rather than simply ignoring the law, Holston argues, elites have purposely manipulated this legal chaos to their own advantage, using it to force conflicts into nonlegal channels where their superior resources can be decisive. Only recently have working-class groups learned to play the same game.

Has democratization changed Brazil for the better? The reply suggested by both books is a very conditional “yes.” Hochstetler and Keck underscore the lack of sustained progress in some areas, including the degradation of the Amazon, but also show that important strides have been made in creating effective legal and institutional structures and in dealing with some other key environmental problems, such as industrial pollution in São Paulo. For his part, Holston acknowledges that Brazil's differentiated citizenship is still largely in force, but he insists that a new, more equitable notion of citizenship has become entrenched in urban lower-class neighborhoods. Its diffusion represents a “radical opportunity” (p. 267) to deepen democracy.