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On November 4, 2015, the Fundão Dam in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais suffered a catastrophic failure and released 60 million cubic meters of toxic, iron-laden mud into the Rio Doce – a major river system that serves 3.6 million people in the Southeast. Owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Brazil’s Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce (CRVD) and Australia’s BHP Billiton Industries, the Fundão Dam was one of the largest mining-oriented water reservoirs in the country. This disaster was identified by IBAMA, the country’s environmental protection agency, as the worst environmental event in Brazil’s industrial history. The disaster’s ramifications continue to unfold, affecting people, wildlife, and ecosystems along the river’s 530-kilometer route through Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo to the Atlantic Ocean. This paper contextualizes the Samarco disaster and its socioecological consequences in a political ecology framework. Specifically, this theoretical research is poised within a politics of scale paradigm. Theory is used to explain the long-standing contradictions between capital and nature through an examination of the Samarco disaster. Specifically, scalar theory explains how capital–nature contradictions facilitated the disaster and Brazil’s on-going struggle to respond to environmental justice at local scales.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of the home country government in the internationalization of multinationals from emerging markets. This is an important topic because governments play a greater role in BRIC countries. We build upon the literature on non-market strategy, extending this to emerging market multinationals.

We ground our arguments based on a multimethod case study of Vale, a Brazilian mining multinational.

Our study suggests that the role of home country governments is crucial for internationalization of firms from emerging markets, but also that it changes over time, is complex, and context-specific. We suggest that non-market strategy development is a process of co-evolution that is intricately linked to both external and internal factors.

These findings are of relevance to emerging markets where governments are less constrained and perhaps more inclined to intervene in the private sector due to a legacy of state-led growth.

We tease out unique links between market shifts, government tactics, and firm strategies. Our study shows the need to shift our attention to home country non-market pressures as an explanatory factor for internationalization trajectories.

Incorporating local space, matter, and society into our concepts of the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for contemporary scholars of both world systems and globalization. Many analysts ignore both materiality and locality of production. They assume the global as their point of departure, and attempt to incorporate the local into it. In this chapter, we aim to reverse that logic. We will take into account and theorize the interaction of natural and social processes. In other words, we will integrate ecologic or materio-spatial logic with sociologic within the economic logic of global markets.