This article aims to present a brief overview of governance and socio-environmental management in Brazil over the past fifty years. Due to its size and resources, Brazil is an international player in environmental issues, which today, with the growing signs of climate change, is at the center of international attention. Socio-environmental management and governance in Brazil have a relatively short history. Although with roots in colonial Brazil and the Empire, the institutional framework for regulating socio-environmental issues dates back to the Republic, more precisely the twentieth century, with the creation of the Special Secretariat for the Environment in 1973. It became even more active after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio-92). Since then, the country has made several decisions to strengthen its institutional framework for environmental governance and management, with notable success in controlling deforestation in the Amazon and in mechanisms of social participation during the first two terms of the Lula government (2003-2010), but it failed to reduce conflicts and create a stronger environmental awareness in society. The Bolsonaro government set out to dismantle this framework through various means, achieving mixed results through budget cuts, the extinction of agencies, staff reductions, and encouragement of illicit practices. With Lula s new term, the challenge is to rebuild this framework and go further, as the environmental situation has worsened from a global perspective.