Reimagining Government S4E4 – Defending the rainforest: Daniela Orofino Poubel’s fight for the Amazon and its peoples

Daniela Orofino Poubel: [00:00:00] All public posts show that the majority of Brazilians, no matter their political spectrum, are pro the protection of the forest. But it’s not their priority. Their priority is the economy. It’s security. The cost of living. Of course, it’s connected to climate. All of this is connected to climate.

Gabrielle Beran: Welcome back to Reimagining Government, the podcast from the Centre for Public Impact.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: We’re your hosts, Kandice Louis-Wilson,

Gabrielle Beran: And Gabrielle Beran. In this season, we’re asking a bold question. What if tackling climate change starts with rethinking who holds power? So, Kandice, I’d love to know when you think back to your younger years, to young Kandice, what images made the strongest impact on you when you thought about the environment and maybe when you started to think about climate change?

Kandice Louis-Wilson: I think of Smokey the Bear, the only way you can prevent forest fires. [00:01:00] If you start a fire,

Smokey the Bear: Be sure to put it out. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.

Gabrielle Beran: For me, growing up in Aotearoa, New Zealand, it was a lot about conservation. I was trapping possums from a young age because of the damage that they do to native birds and to native trees, and of course, being close to Antarctica or relatively close. We did learn a lot about, you know, polar ice caps melting. But places like the Amazon, which were always in books and in stories, and kind of that central part of the climate conversation as I grew older, always felt really, really far away.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: We talked about the Amazon often, like in your social studies class, you would hear about those different regions. We often talked about the people in the Amazon, the history of the Amazon, but we never really talked about deforestation or the climate issues going on there.

News Reporter: The world’s biggest rainforest. The Amazon has lost an area the size of Germany and France combined,

News Reporter 2: [00:02:00] and this is how the Amazon is disappearing by literally going up in smoke. Because of the changing climate, the dry season is getting longer, temperatures are hotter, and there’s less rainfall, and that means when fires start, they burn more of the forest.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: As this episode airs, Brazil is hosting COP 30, the Global Climate Conference in Belém, a city in the heart of the Amazon region.

Gabrielle Beran: It’s a moment that could put the rainforest and the people who have long fought to protect it. At the centre of the global climate conversation, the world will be watching the region not just as a symbol, but as a source of solutions. So in this episode, we are heading to Brazil to learn from those who’ve been protecting the rainforest and its people for decades.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: To some of us, the name Chico Mendes may be unfamiliar, but across Latin America, he is celebrated as a well-known inspiration in the campaign against deforestation in the Amazon. Born in the Shapiro region of Brazil. His assassination sparked international outcry, and his legacy continues to inspire grassroots activism across Latin America and the world today. Today, though, Brazil faces a different moment. What does climate leadership from the ground up look like now, and how might governments reimagine power, leadership, and land stewardship through that lens

Gabrielle Beran: To find out in this episode of Reimagining Government. We’re speaking with Daniela Orofino Poubel, director at Amazônia de Pé, a Brazilian grassroots movement, on the protection of the Amazon and its peoples.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Daniela is a sociologist from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with an executive degree in leadership in organising from the Harvard Kennedy School and a master’s in Information Science from IBICT. Her work brings together over 300 organisations across Brazil to push for change in the Amazon. We speak to Daniela after this short break.[00:04:00]

Dhiviya: Hello, I’m Divya David, regional Director for Asia at the Centre for Public Impact. When we talk about climate change, the science can often feel distant, filled with technical terms and data that don’t always connect with everyday life. That’s why we created the Decoding Climate Science Toolkit, a resource that helps bridge that gap. Born from our work in Bengaluru, it brings together community stories, local knowledge and science, helping people and governments make sense of climate impacts where they actually live and work. In the wake of COP30. As governments turn global commitments into local action, this toolkit offers a way to bring those big ideas home, grounding them in the lived experiences of diverse people and communities. So if you’re a policymaker, educator, or community leader, explore how you can use it in your own context. Visit centreforpublicimpact.org and [00:05:00] search for decoding climate science. Meaningful climate action starts when people understand and shape the science together.

Gabrielle Beran: Welcome back to Reimagining Government.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Hello, Daniela. How are you doing today?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: Hello? Hello, Kandice? Hello, Gabrielle. I’m great. Great to be here with you both. Oh, thank you so much.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: And where are you joining us from?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: I’m talking from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: First of all, I love Rio de Janeiro. Uh, it’s one of my favourite places to be. So I’m a little envious of you in the beautiful background that you have right now. It is dark and gloomy here and in Washington, DC, so I’m a bit jealous. But let’s just get started. So, can you introduce yourself, your career journey so far, and what keeps you motivated to do this work?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: I am a sociologist. I am Brazilian. I am 32 years old. I’ve initiated my professional life as an activist here in Rio around human rights and city-based issues. [00:06:00] And it was in a time that Brazil was having a lot of, uh, social mobilisations around cities. It was before the World Cup, before the Olympics. We had major demonstrations around the whole country, and a lot of people from my generation got themselves formed also by this moment that the country was living. I started my professional life as a congressional advisor for a state congressman here in Rio, who was the president of the Human Rights Chamber. Rio is a big state with a lot of beautiful and incredible things. I’m a big fan of the city. But it’s also a really complex state with a lot of human rights violations. I worked with him for five years. It was a really transforming time, being within the state, institutional politics, trying to force the creation and allocation of budgets for the implementation of public policies around human rights and youth rights. I was, at the time, like 24, 25, so I was speaking from [00:07:00] within the group too. I stopped working with, uh, Marcello, the congressman, and it was the same year that Marielle Franco was murdered here in Rio. Marielle was a human rights offender, uh, lesbian activist. Marielle worked with Marcello too, so we worked together for these five years, and then she was elected a councilwoman herself on the 14th of March 2018. She was killed here in Rio in a political crime.

News Reporter 3: Brazilians continue to mourn the loss of 38-year-old Rio De Janeiro city council member and human rights activist Marielle Franco, who is a black lesbian was known for her fierce criticism of police killings and Brazil’s impoverished favela neighbourhoods.

Daniela Orofino Poubel: It was a really hard year for everybody who worked with human rights in Brazil, and especially the ones who worked with her. Of course, she became such a symbol nationwide, and it was, I think, a [00:08:00] major year in my career where I shifted a lot of things. And so I came back to civil society, and in 2021, as the campaign director, we had the idea of building Amazônia de Pé. Uh, we were working with 35 climate activists from Brazil. We’re doing an activist training for them, uh, with advocacy, communication skills, organising skills and everything that was launched in 2022. Draw together, talked with a lot of partners, like creating this big campaign, and since then, I’ve become the director of Amazônia de Pé. We worked inside of NASAs until this June and from June. Now we are an autonomous organisation.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Yes. Such an amazing role to be an executive director at such a young age of 32. I love that. Can you tell us some of the projects that you’re working on right now and why do they matter?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: So Amazônia de Pé is a resilient grassroots movement. We are focused on the protection of the Amazon and its peoples. We’re not talking only about the forest, we’re talking about the people who live in the forest and [00:09:00] keep the forest tending to indigenous communities, traditional communities and conservation units and other populations that we have in the Amazon. We have a volunteer network all over the country, more than 20,000 volunteers. We have already enlisted and trained, and we have a coalition of more than 400 partners. Right now, we have a big target, which is the protection of the public forests in the Amazon, in the Brazilian Amazon. Right now we have more than 50 million of public forests. We’re talking about areas that are owned by the Brazilian state, which are from all of us Brazilians, and they were not designated for any kind of legal protection. And it’s an amount of land that it’s huge only inside the Amazon. We’re talking about a size of like an amount of land that’s bigger than Spain. And since they were not designated for any kind of legal protection, they are the specific areas where deforestation rates are the highest in the forest right now, because it’s really easy for land robbers to invade these areas that are public and not. [00:10:00] Protected legally, and then afterwards start the forestation and illegally grab this piece of land. It’s a really big problem that we have in the Amazon right now, and it’s something that could be solved by the Brazilian state, by designating this area for legal protection, making them indigenous territories, conservation units like Parks, National Parks and Reserves, which are proven to be the best ways to protect the Amazon. All data shows that these areas are the most protected ones. The designated ones are the most protected. Our main goal as Amazônia de Pé, since we launched in 2022 and until we make it happen, is to force Brazil to protect this area. We have different projects around this issue. We do climate education projects in schools and universities. We do volunteer training. We do an advocacy strategy and, uh, institutional strategy in dialogue with the local governments and the federal government. We do cultural events, but we are always talking about the [00:11:00] protection of this 50 million hectares and the people who live in this area and could have this area legally designated for their protection.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: That’s amazing and such a large feat. You said there are over 25,000 volunteers and over 400 different partners, so I could imagine that’s a large undergoing, right. But what are the benefits of working in such a large coalition, and do you think that collective action is necessary to combat climate change around the world?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: I think that working with a coalition was like a principle for Amazônia de Pé from the beginning. We only chose the protection of the public forest as a target and as a goal. After talking with a lot of organisations, we did a lot of meetings and hearings and tried to find this common issue with them that if it was tackled, it would have, uh, an impact so huge, actually globally, because it’s basically about protecting the biggest rainforest and the growth. So this amount of land can actually make a difference in Amazon’s being protected [00:12:00] and not reaching a tipping point. We did a lot of talking with other organisations, indigenous movements, researchers that have been working in the region forever, institutes and partners. And then we decided that Public Forest would be our goal, and we launched it only when 50 of these partners said, We are going to do this together. Our first mobilisation tool was to draw a public demand view around the protection of this area. We wrote with these partners, a public demand view forcing the Brazil state to designate all the undesignated public forests in the Amazon for these specific categories. Indigenous communities, quilombola, which are African descent communities here in Brazil, who are also traditional people in the Amazon that live there right now and have been living there forever. Building this public demand view was already the coalition’s work. We could not have done it without our partners from the beginning because they were the ones who had the expertise [00:13:00] to say, this public demand bill should be written with these terms. This is better. This will work better. So we wrote it together. And we understood that we could not do it without specifically, and uh, especially the traditional communities movements that represented the people who could be affected by this view. They were our main partners to write this bill and to see if they were satisfied with what the bill was presenting, because if this bill gets approved and if this public policy gets implemented, we’re talking about designating them as protectors of these areas, so they should have to be part of this construction. It took a lot of months. It was a lot of time listening to partners, designing this view, choosing everything. Choosing the groups of action that we’re going to have, our identity, and our design. Everything was built from scratch and with a lot of participation. When you asked me the strengths of working in a coalition, I think it’s that [00:14:00] this wouldn’t be possible in another way. We needed indigenous movements to sit together with researchers and to sit together with quilombolas’ movements that do not always, uh, agree with each other in the same room to say, okay, what do we defend for this area? What is our dream for this area? What do we want for these 50 million hectares of forest, and draw this together? And I think that implementing a public demands bill is something that’s only possible too with a massive work of volunteers. In Brazil’s, uh, constitution, we have this participatory tool, but it’s really hard. It’s been done like three times in Brazil’s history. Because you need to collect 1.5 million physical signatures on paper, it was like right after COVID, we decided to do it this way. Knowing that it’s really hard, it can take a lot of years, decades. It’s not like signing an online petition in five minutes. You have to print a paper, collect signatures, and go to the mail. It’s a generation that maybe never goes to the mail and goes to do [00:15:00] that. But it’s also really interesting because it actually has something that connects us to different parts of the country, and we are always really stuck in the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo area, which are the richest areas in Brazil. Amazônia de Pé has, interestingly, a base that’s out of the certain; we can have like five, 500 people in a really small city in the middle of the northeast because one student decided she was going to be a volunteer and then collected 500 signatures. It was also something challenging for us. How can we bring this subject to the spaces where people are, because even though the majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, Brazilians don’t really relate to the forest because they don’t live there. And even the ones who live in the Amazon region, most of them live in the big cities. We have huge cities in the Amazon region. It’s not all forest. There are a lot of people who live in urban areas. Like, how can we make Brazilians understand that this is something that its rich, that it’s ours, and that its [00:16:00] destruction can impact all of our lives. I think it’s all about collective action because trying to talk about land distribution in Brazil and land protection in Brazil is really hard, especially in Congress right now. It’s something that will only be possible by being a forced issue into Congress. What we have to do is to make this a subject. It isn’t like we have a government, a federal government that is committed to this cause. We have an environmental minister who is committed to discussing, but it’s advancing really slowly. Why? It has to be a stronger political will from Brazilians. It is even something that international pressure can really force. We’ve seen this in our last government,

News Reporter 4: Brazil. President J. Bolsonaro is accused of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

Daniela Orofino Poubel: He wasn’t worried about France or Germany. It didn’t change national politics, so that’s why we think it’s a collective action from Brazilians that can make this [00:17:00] turnaround in the country too. I think it’s a long-term change in the way the country relates to climate and the Amazon.

Gabrielle Beran: Daniela, that was so interesting. Just so that our listeners fully understand, you spoke about how there is not sort of the political will and that politics is sort of working in the other direction, away from this. Are you able to explain to us, and particularly to me, I’m wondering like what are some of those incentives that mean that people don’t want to protect this land? What’s the business interest, the political interests that are at play here specifically, so that we can help to to understand it even more.

Daniela Orofino Poubel: When I talk about Amazônia de Pé with non-Brazilians, a lot of people ask me that and I always think like, really why? Why people are working in the other direction doesn’t really make sense. But we have a really complex political scenario in Brazil right now, uh, and historically, but talking about the moment that we’re living right now, we have a federal government that was elected by a broad coalition [00:18:00] in 2022, which is Lula. Who was already a president for the workers’ party. A progressive campaign and mandate, but also a broad coalition, so different interests represented inside the government. We have a lot of disagreements between, for instance, the environmental ministry in Brazil, which is Marina da Silva, and an amazing environmental leader, but we also have in the same government, the energy ministry for example, disagreeing on something that the environmental ministry is doing publicly. It’s not, uh, really cohesive government. There are different forces inside the government. And in Brazil, we have a really strong force that is only getting stronger. It’s not strong from today. It’s historically strong, but it’s only getting stronger, we’ll call it in Brazil, the rural caucus. It’s the representatives of the agri-business. They have really economic power in [00:19:00] the country. They’re the sectors with the biggest incentives from the governments, for example. They’re really well funded from the state. They are the biggest part of our economy too. So they have this big economic power, and they also have a huge political power. They are the main force in the Brazilian Congress right now. The Rural Caucus and the agribusiness in Brazil, their electoral campaigns are highly well funded. They have two think tanks associated with the rural caucus. They have an annual budget of 300 Amazônia de Pé. They invest in Brazilian soap operas. They have characters in the soap operas that represent the business. When people ask me, What do Brazilians think? All public posts show that the majority of Brazilians, no matter their political spectrum, are pro the protection of the forest. Like it’s a cause that people relate to, but it’s not their priority. Their priority is the economy. It’s a [00:20:00] security, it’s job guaranteeing, it’s other, it’s the cost of leaving. Of course, it’s connected to climate. All of this is connected to climate, and I think that they’ve been getting a lot of arguments and influence that it’s not organic, that it’s paid and distributed with a narrative, that we should not advance in indigenous rights. These indigenous people are lazy. They already have a lot of land. If we keep protecting the Amazon, it’s our jobs that are at stake. The investors will not want to come to Brazil anymore. Or the narrative that the climate environmentalists in Brazil are actually working for the interests of other countries. They’re from big NGOs, international NGOs who are trying to interfere. It’s crazy. It’s a really complex field, but even though we have big agribusiness companies that we’ve been dialoguing with, because we think that it’s important to bring them also to the table, it’s impressive how the political representation in Congress, it’s all about the local powers in [00:21:00] Brazil in these areas. The local farmers that are getting elected and getting to Congress. And then we can have a federal government who is hosting COP30 and with the lowest deforestation rates in the Amazon for the last years because they’re actually doing something and implementing the laws that we already have. But we have, at the same time in Congress getting approved the most horrible legislation around indigenous rights in Brazil’s democratic history, which is Marco Tempora. It’s a tragedy. Uh, I think it’s a long response, but I think it’s good to understand how Brazil’s political context. It’s really complex right now, and it can get much more complex next year when we’ll have federal elections again for the federal government, state governments, and Congress.

Gabrielle Beran: You spoke before about how so many Brazilians live in cities, like in so much of the world we live in cities, but that connection to land is really [00:22:00] essential. Have you found through your work any way to help people, particularly those who live in cities, to reconnect with the land, to see themselves as part of the land movement? One of my heroes is the First Nations American author and Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she says, What if we remembered that we love the land? And I’m probably not paraphrasing that correctly, but I think about that a lot. Anyway, I’d love to know what you have found successful to remind people that they love the land.

Daniela Orofino Poubel: I think a lot about my father in this. My father and mother are the ones who pass on the love for the land to me. Like they’re always doing trekking and camping. And since I was a kid, it was something that even though living in the city I did with them. And it’s interesting because my father has a really different political opinion from mine. And I’m always thinking when I’m in a really beautiful waterfall, I’m thinking like, ah, my dad would love to be here. And immediately I think, and how come my dad doesn’t understand? And that electing this kind of government official can put this place at risk. My mind already does that, but I think it’s a [00:23:00] really good door. And I’ve had good dialogues with my father about, for instance, uh, a beautiful place with waterfalls that he loves in Brazil, in the centre of Brazil. It’s called Chapada dos Veadeiros. It’s amazing. And they have a city region, which is a quilombola area, and the waterfalls are all protected by the Kalunga people who are the guides. You have to enter with the guide. And my father talks about this place with a lot of respect. And I think like, can you understand, like when I’m talking about traditional communities’ rights, this thing that’s being discussed by Congress, it’s about this. I think he he has the difficulty understanding that it’s the same thing. It’s those people who are protecting the waterfall. And I think that we should connect more with ecological tourism is something big in Brazil because we have. Amazing national parks and beautiful places, and we also have community tourism and uh, indigenous tourism happening in the country. How can we connect Amazon Amazônia de Pé with these networks, because it’s always a time and an opportunity. To talk to a person who is [00:24:00] living this experience and remembering that this matters and why it matters. So it’s something that we haven’t done, but it’s something that we could do a lot in Amazônia de Pé, that we are preserving territories and protecting cultures. What we’ve done in Amazônia de Pé since the beginning is try to have a cultural mobilisation. As one of our strategies, so we do cultural festivals, we do the National Day of Actions in the whole country. And when we talk with the volunteers about what they can do, we always try to inspire them to do something cultural. They can do like a debate with a movie. They can do a cultural festival, they can do a poetry thing, and it’s also a strategy to fight this idea that people don’t really want to organise themselves collectively anymore. They’re like more individualistic. They can do anything from their homes. Like it’s good to be out with people, to connect with them and do it through culture. I think that not only brings these people together during the activity, but also connects with the region that maybe they don’t remember that they are [00:25:00] connected with. When they listen to the music that has been done in these territories, or when they watch a documentary, or they go to a festival, they understand that, wow, we can relate. Like, there’s also people there. And they have this amazing culture that is also at risk when the forest is at risk.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Something that you said resonated with me, you’re talking about the different like music and culture, and I think something that we talk about here in the States all the time is like we’re losing the recipes, the things that have been passed down from our ancestors and the generations ahead of us. Right? And I love that you all are. Creating these opportunities, ’cause even like tourism, it’s our generation that is, you know, we are the ones planning the family trips. We are the ones who are determining what’s going on and how that’s happening. As you said earlier, you’re 32, you’re pretty young, and so can you have any reflections on how your age and gender have impacted how you approach your climate activism? Like I see the things that you’re doing as far as like let’s influence culture, let’s show people what’s happening. But what are some other things that you’re doing that’s related to your age and gender that [00:26:00] you are using to impact how you approach climate activism?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: I think it’s interesting that Amazônia de Pé, we are, uh, as a team, we’re a 20-person team, and we are mostly young women, like from 20, we are 17 women. This causes a lot of things, not only how we organise ourselves internally, the organisation, and also how we reorganise ourselves with the partners, with the volunteers, with our strategy. First, internally, I think that it’s a challenge because we are an organisation that is led by young women, and we know that even though that brings a lot of good things in, it presents a lot of challenges, especially in the fundraising field and the advocacy field. So we are the ones who are presenting with the big funders, with the big politicians, and not always, they respect 32 year old woman, but I think that we’ve been finding a lot of space, even though this is a challenge and I think it, it’s always a challenge when we’re [00:27:00] forming the internal leaderships in the organisation because we have to believe that we are ready and capable to do it. I think that being a woman-led team makes us have this gender lens all the time in all our projects. It’s never something that, oops, this, we’re doing this table with three men and one woman. This could never happen, like from the beginning of the project, the design of the project, we always have the gender lens in what we’re building. And I think it’s great because in the climate field we are talking especially about women leaders in the indigenous movements, in the quilombola movements. There’s a lot of women leaders whom we can learn from. It’s good that we have the organisation all set up to listen to these people and to find these people and to connect with these people, and to also try to push the younger ones. We have a lot of girl leaders, too, and I think that they have a place where they know that they can thrive. Because when we do projects with them, we’re always like pushing them and trying to connect them with other opportunities. The whole project is really [00:28:00] receptive and sensitive to girls and women. I think it’s a challenge for us, and we’ve been looking at this specifically, how can we work with boys? Because it’s also worrying to see public posts, for instance, around the political choices from girls and boys at the same age being so different. So it’s something that we need to look at. And I think that having the gender lens, maybe because the women’s movement already does a lot of debate around it, it was also something that helped us bring on the race discussions and the regional discussions into Amazônia de Pé too. So Amazônia de Pé has a lot of racial diversity. We have indigenous people, black people, and white people from the whole country. And Brazil is a country with really deep regional differences. Uh, we have a really rich zone in Brazil, which is the southeast with Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and the north region. The Amazon Rainforest is one of the poorest regions, with the Northeast and has always been a really [00:29:00] neglected region in Brazil from schools, books and history where we learn and from television and everything like from journalism, and I think that being a team led by women also helped us put this on the table and face it and try to understand how we’re going to work together, not only in the team, but with the volunteers. So Amazônia de Pé has a coalition of 400 partners. It’s a national movement, but it has a lot of legitimacy with the movements that work on the ground, and that’s not easy to build. It’s something that’s built on relations from the team with their partners, and they understand that they are being respected in this relation, and they are growing with this relation as we are growing too. I actually think that we did it well because it’s a team of women, not that men wouldn’t be capable of doing. Of course they would. But I think that we put it as a priority, like as a political person being a woman.

Gabrielle Beran: [00:30:00] and that is the answer that that everybody needs to listen to. I think if you just listen to one piece today. Daniela, with great sadness. We are nearly at the end, and I have to ask you our final question, and we ask all our guests to share a key learning. If you could share something and speak directly to governments at all levels, local, national, federal, state, what do these government figures and public servants need to learn from your organisation and your work?

Daniela Orofino Poubel: The people already have the answer. It is not about finding the answer, it’s how can we find this answer within the people that already have the answer. This big message for COP 30, the answer is this, it started in the, in the Brazilian indigenous movement, but it spread on to a global indigenous movement and they’re adopting this, the sentence for COP30. This answer already exists. A way of living in the [00:31:00] forest while keeping the forest is something that it’s been done. There are people doing it, trying to do it, fighting for their lives while doing it, and it’s frustrating when the COPs are happening, and we understand that the negotiations don’t really relate to what the answers are being created on the ground, and I really hope that Brazil’s COP will be able to connect these two universes. The negotiators and the politicians that are representing each country and the diplomats and the ones who are living in the territories, they are affected by climate change or that could be the solution to fight climate change. And I think the Amazon will be the perfect place to put those two stakeholders, group of stakeholders in the same city, and I’m really excited for November.

Gabrielle Beran: Daniela, thank you so much for joining us and best of luck and we will be following your progress very closely. Such a joy to speak to you [00:32:00] today. Kandice, if that didn’t wake you up in the morning, ha, nothing’s going to. Right?

Kandice Louis-Wilson: Absolutely. That was an amazing conversation. I left it feeling like deeply energised and also inspired by so much of the work that they’re doing. I loved how the collective has brought in so many perspectives. It was a true like stakeholder engagement, ’cause you see where people are like, oh, we brought everybody to the table. But it’s like, no, we’re not making decisions without other people. We’re involving them in even just the creation of the name and you don’t see that, and especially with 300-plus partners. So I just thought that was just deeply inspiring. It’s shaped by the diversity of the voices, the discussion about the rural caucus. Recognising that, you know, they’re the biggest part of the economy with like the most significant political influence. Um, and then how they’ve strategically like integrated into everyday media, helping shape people’s understandings of environmental realities. What it made me reflect on is that there’s a global trend of politicians using [00:33:00] environmental interests and as platforms for their political runs. And, you know, we saw that last election here in the United States. But to see that happen in other places just shows that, that’s, this is becoming a global trend because climate is a global issue. And then I was motivated again when they started talking about moving into more cultural engagement. So like culture sharing, um, the festivals that they’re having, the different types of community events that they’re doing to share those cultural pieces and to work intentionally to educate people around them. And then their intentionality about working with men and boys and using gender as a like entry point for conversations about race and class.

Gabrielle Beran: I feel like that’s the classic climate journey. I got sad for a bit. But then I saw some people doing cool stuff. Right, right. And I was like, it’s gonna be fine. What Daniella really encapsulated was something we talk about at CPI a lot, which is like, you can only move at the speed of trust. And it’s slow, like sometimes building trust, as she said, across communities who maybe don’t know each other, who historically had slightly different [00:34:00] interests, um, who maybe still have different interests to this day, but they can agree on protecting. Mm-hmm. This land. I even love the idea of like, that you have to get physical papers signed. Yes. There is something tangible about that. I loved it. But also in my head, ’cause I used to along like many years ago, I used to administer elections. It was my first job out of college, and like, so the piles of papers I was kinda imagining. Right. Imagining those rooms. Right.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: so funny. Mines was, uh, doing the census. And then the sense that, oh, you get this. So, yeah. Yeah. So you have, but there is, there is a tangibility about just like that physical connection, but also think about just how like it’s intergenerational because my grandmother is not getting online to fill out a survey. And if you call her, she’s gonna think you’re spam and she’s gonna hang up. So she’s not gonna, you know, so that, that, that ability to build connections with people who don’t have access to the internet, who don’t have access to online survey, they’re onnecting environmental actions to people, lived experience and identities. And that’s so deeply [00:35:00] powerful. But you’re right. It’s not something that you can do like this. It takes time. It takes weeding out, it takes coming to the table and having hard conversations, and hearing from people from all over the world. Now we’ve talked to people from South Africa and now, you know, South America, and then bringing in my own perspective from the United States, it’s crazy that we are all over the world, and we’re facing the same challenges. We’re looking at the same issues in politics, we’re looking at the same issues. And you know, the difference of culture, the difference of working with, you know, people across so many broad spectrums of class, race, gender, even though it comes with so many different, like these are the bad things. It’s also inspiring, and it brings hope, right? Because that means that there are so many different people working on it. And so I leave inspired to know that. My brothers and sisters across the pond are all in this with us. That was one of the things I think I took from this today. And to see someone who’s close in age and close in character and close in like background as [00:36:00] me doing this work, it inspires me and challenges me to step up to the plate even more.

Gabrielle Beran: Thank you for listening to this episode of Reimagining Government. This is a special series on climate and gender brought to you by the Centre for Public Impact. If you want to learn more about the work we do at CPI. Check out our website at centreforpublicimpact.org, and that’s C-E-N-T-R-E.

Kandice Louis-Wilson: If you enjoyed this episode and are enjoying this series so far, please consider rating and reviewing on your podcast app. It only takes a few seconds, and it helps us reach more people and keep the show going. It’s also just nice to be nice, so consider it your good deed for the day. I’m Gabrielle. And I’m Kandice. We’ll see you next time.