Polluter by Proxy: Norwegian Environmentally Harmful Mining Activities in Brazil as State-Corporate Crime
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Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná
Brazil -
Erasmus University Rotterdam Netherlands
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Erasmus University Rotterdam United States
Abstract
This article examines the role of state actors in polluting activities across borders, focusing on a case study of Norway’s role in Norsk Hydro’s polluting activities in Barcarena, Brazil from 1967 to 2024. Foreign corporations have long exploited Brazil’s natural resources, with Norwegian enterprises increasingly involved. Norsk Hydro’s operations, particularly at the Alunorte alumina refinery, have caused severe ecological damage. Using state-corporate crime theory and Southern green criminology, this study analyses leaks, toxic waste disposal in rivers and asymmetrical mining standards. To assess environmental standards, this study conducted interviews, document analyses, site visits and literature reviews. Our findings indicate that Norwegian public and private interests are intertwined, with profit motives undermining environmental aspirations and stated policies. This tendency to subordinate environmental protection abroad to financial expediency domestically is generalized through the concept of polluters by proxy. This concept attempts to represent types of activities where state actors produce environmental harm abroad and benefit economically while distancing themselves from direct responsibility by taking advantage of corporate structures.
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Author Biographies
Fernando Procópio Palazzo is a legal scholar and professional with over a decade of experience at the Court of Justice of the State of Paraná (Brazil), where he has served as a legal advisor and chief of staff to judges in chambers specialized in environmental, corporate, and organized crime. His career has been marked by direct involvement in complex cases involving environmental harm, corporate liability, and state accountability, contributing to the development of legal responses to environmental degradation in Brazil.
He also holds a Master of Science in Criminology from Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam and Ghent Universiteit, where he specialized in Green Criminology and environmental harm. His research draws on both legal and interdisciplinary perspectives to explore global value chains, environmental governance, climate justice, and the structural asymmetries between the Global North and Global South. He is particularly interested in the implications of European regulatory frameworks—such as the European Green Deal and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)—on countries in the Global South, especially Brazil.
He is a member of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) at Brown University, where his work focuses on climate obstruction, environmental crime, and transnational corporate accountability.
Palazzo has published in national and international journals and co-authored the book Historical Trials of Environmental Law in Brazil. His academic and professional work centers on the intersection of environmental law, climate change, and global corporate accountability, with particular attention to state-corporate crime, transnational environmental harm, and the role of law in advancing environmental justice and inclusive sustainability.
Lieselot Bisschop is Full Professor in the Department of Law, Society and Crime of Erasmus School of Law. As co-chair on Public & Private Interests of the Dutch Sector Plan for Law, she focuses on how public and private actors together or individually govern public interests, with a particular focus on the environment and human rights. As core faculty of the multidisciplinary research team of the Erasmus Initiative on Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity, she invests in gaining insights into the drivers of environmental degradation and social exclusion and into the ways in which governments, businesses and civil society can individually and jointly take up governance responsibilities to reach inclusive prosperity. Her core areas of interest and expertise are environmental harm, corporate crime, organized crime and environmental governance, with studies drug trafficking, e-waste trafficking, planned obsolescence of electronics, wildlife, gold and timber trafficking, shipbreaking, coastal land loss and, most recently, industrial (PFAS) pollution. The difficult balance between economic, environmental and social considerations and between public and private governance is what continues to intrigue her and inspires her research.
Yogi Hale Hendlin is Core Faculty of the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity Initiative and Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy in the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, as well as a Full Member of The Center to End Corporate Harm at the University of California, San Francisco. Hendlin’s research at the nexus of environmental philosophy and public health has multiple foci, including environmental justice in the Southern Cone (especially Brasil), the commercial determinants of health (especially tobacco, chemical, and fossil fuel industries), and the relationship between democracy and ecology. Hendlin is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biosemiotics (Springer), and has published two co-edited volumes, Being Algae: Transformations in Water, Plants (Brill 2024) and Food and Medicine: A Biosemiotic Perspective (Springer 2021). Currently working on two monographs, Hendlin also is co-investigator or co-PI on various European grants on trust in science and applying biosemiotics to early detection and prevention of hypomimia-based diseases like Parkinson’s, as well as other funded projects on networks industry consultancies, and the attempt of fossil fuel and fertilizer producers to create path-dependency for ammonia as the next shipping fuel.