From Green Goals to Social Gaps? An assessment of Brazil’s Sustainable Taxonomy from a gender perspective
This paper investigates the challenges of adopting the sustainability approach – which addresses environmental and social objectives together – in the design of public taxonomies as instruments of climate policy. Using the Sustainable Taxonomy of Brazil (STB) as a case study and focusing on its key socioeconomic objective – reducing gender and race inequalities – it emphasizes risks other than greenwashing and particularly related to labor market indicators and permeated by a gender (and racial) perspective. From existing taxonomies, we identify three risks of the sustainability approach: the winner-takes-all effect, social-washing, and structural incompatibility. Then, we conduct a two-step empirical analysis, combining a macro-overview of Brazil’s productive, occupational, and emission structures with a microdata analysis of STB-eligible sectors focused on key gender (and racial) inequality indicators. Our findings reveal a core contradiction: the sectors most critical for emission reduction in Brazil (such as agriculture and livestock) feature relatively small, predominantly male-dominated, and low-paying jobs. On top of that, a discussion of the STB’s Gender and Racial Equity Index (GREI) demonstrates that structural gender inequality and female underrepresentation operate independently of other inequality indicators and require specific analysis and targeted policies. We conclude that although the STB identifies both key emitting sectors and underrepresented activities from a gender (and racial) perspective, it cannot ensure that risks mentioned above are out of question. Despite recognizing the inner limitations of an instrument that supports sustainable finance, we argue that public taxonomies should consider structural features regarding both the environmental and the socioeconomic dimension.