Biofuel Sustainability and the Formation of Transnational Hybrid Governance (original) (raw)

In this article we examine the transnational governance of sustainable biofuels and its coexistence with the WTO trade regime. The analysis of how the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is shaping transnational biofuel governance shows deep and mutual dependence between public and private. The EU relies on a private system of compliance and verification. At the same time, private certification schemes are dependent on the incentives provided by RED to expand commercially. A second layer of hybridity in this governance system is that it is emerging in the shadow of the WTO. EU policy makers refrained from introducing binding requirements on social sustainability criteria in RED. It was left to private certifiers to fill this gap. This article also serves as an editorial introduction to the overall symposium on the ‘Transnational Hybrid Governance’ (THG) of sustainable biofuels. The three articles in the symposium analyse the complex making and mutual shaping of ‘sustainable biofuels’ and discuss the institutional features, processes, networks and socio-technical devices by which markets are organized and economic and political orders take shape.