Abstract Brazil experienced the opening-up and democratization of its foreign policymaking in the last decades, but since 2016 a wave of bureaucratic reforms sought to reverse that process. This paper contributes to understanding this phenomenon by looking at the agri-food dimension of Brazilian foreign policy. Through the analysis of official documental and discursive data, we discuss successive symbolic-discursive, as well as policy-institutional governmental efforts to close-off foreign policymaking to peasant family farmers and their interests. The study reveals changing patterns in state-society interfaces, and contributes to bridging the fields of Foreign Policy Analysis, Policy Dismantling and Social Participation.

Abstract The increased political significance of South-South Cooperation (SSC), globally and within Brazilian Foreign Policy, has produced a variety of SSC accountability-related disputes. This paper unpacks the ways in which accountability has been problematised and negotiated in the last decade between the competing stakeholders and publics of Brazilian SSC along three intersecting dimensions: geopolitical, bureaucratic and state-society relations.

Abstract In 2011, Brazil finally approved a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act that recognises and regulates the right to public information. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to its impact on Brazilian foreign policy. How has the Brazilian ministry of foreign affairs responded and adapted to this new law? Has it been adequately implemented, and if not, in what ways? Also, how do these challenges in promoting transparent foreign policy connect to the broader debate about democratising Brazilian foreign policy? This article analyses the implementation of the FOI Act by mapping all the requests for information refused by the foreign affairs ministry since 2012, and exploring its legal and political justifications for withholding information. We further argue that the ministry’s adherence to the law is an important factor in the democratisation of foreign policy-making in Brazil.