Carbon Markets and Natural Climate Solutions in Brazil: Institutional Coherence Across Biodiversity, Land‐Use and Territorial Governance

This study examines how natural climate solutions (NCS) are institutionalised through carbon market governance in tropical contexts, focusing on Brazil's emerging Emissions Trading System (SBCE). It contributes to debates on the effectiveness, equity and governance of nature‐based climate action by analysing how carbon market instruments interact with biodiversity governance, land‐use regulation and socio‐ecological systems characterised by territorial diversity and inequality in Brazil. Using a qualitative multi‐method design combining statutory and document analysis, legislative process tracing, and computationally assisted text analysis, the study evaluates horizontal, vertical and functional coherence across climate, biodiversity, land‐use and territorial governance domains. The findings show that the SBCE represents a significant regulatory innovation, supported by a technically advanced architecture, particularly in monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems and registries. However, institutional coherence remains partial and uneven, with stronger integration in financial and technical domains than across biodiversity, land‐use and territorial governance systems. Stakeholder patterns are also uneven: governmental and financial actors have greater procedural visibility, while territorial, Indigenous and environmental actors are more strongly concentrated in formal or supplementary legislative records and are less consistently represented across procedural stages. These patterns indicate differentiated institutional access rather than, by themselves, a direct measure of stakeholder influence. The findings suggest that NCS governance in tropical contexts can be institutionalised through carbon‐market frameworks that operate alongside, rather than fully integrated with, broader socio‐ecological governance systems. These findings further suggest that deeper institutional integration and meaningful inclusion of territorially embedded actors are important conditions for effective and legitimate NCS governance.