Whether economic liberalization policies benefit human and environmental ecosystems remains a question. Yet, privatization is the one neoliberal policy generally regarded as positively affecting the socioenvironmental performance of highly pollutant (former) state firms. Such an assumption, however, requires further probing. It relies on analyses of firms' internal managerial and technological changes and their impacts on the productive cycle. By addressing the social and environmental impacts of privatization exclusively within the perimeter of a firm's operation, most studies neglect to evaluate how privatization has affected companies' socioenvironmental performance beyond those boundaries. The author contends that the relationship between privatization and environmental sustainability is inevitably affected by politics, and that such an intervening variable must be formally recognized. By comparing the social and environmental performance of a mining company before and after its privatization, she demonstrates how politics has affected assessments of the company's socioenvironmental impact and the claims that its privatization has benefited Amazonian socioenvironmental conditions.
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