Biofuel Sustainability and the Formation of Transnational Hybrid Governance (original) (raw)
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Geoforum, 2022
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Sustainability, 2018
The European Union (EU) stands at a crossroads regarding its biofuel policies. For more than a decade, the EU sought to create a market for and govern sustainable biofuels for the transport sector, even as debates over sustainability escalated. It did so by devising novel hybrid (public and private) governance arrangements. We took stock of the nature and outcomes of this experiment in hybrid biofuel governance. We relied on qualitative methods of analysis, whereby we reviewed and synthesized the evolution of EU biofuel governance arrangements over time, through detailed document analysis of secondary and primary literature, including EU and related policy documents and private certification scheme websites. Our analysis reveals that, instead of yielding an increasingly stringent sustainability framework, the hybrid EU governance arrangements resulted in a proliferation of relatively lax, industry-driven, sustainability standards, even as the notion of “sustainable biofuels” remaine...
When Normative and Market Power Interact: The European Union and Global Biofuels Governance
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2017
Drawing on the literature on the market and normative power of the EU, we document and explain the limited success of the EU in transferring its environmental standards with respect to sustainable biofuels governance to the world's two largest biofuels producersthe US and Braziland to two international standard setting organizations, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP). Our explanation highlights four factors: first, the extent to which EU strategies to strengthen its market power can undermine its normative power; second, the limits to EU policy influence posed by other actors' use of their own market and normative power resources; third, the diminished influence of a late policy-mover; and fourth, the difficulty of establishing normative leadership in a policy field subject to epistemic contestation.
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The sustainability of biofuels has been a topic gaining recognition in the European Union’s policy making during recent years. Simultaneously, scholars have observed the use of new and indirect modes of governance in the EU, used to complement its habitual regulatory approach. On this basis, this thesis examines the European Commission’s governance of biofuels between 2003 and 2009. It aims to examine under what conditions the Commission has engaged in indirect governance of biofuels. Using the concept of orchestration, it explains that the Commission started orchestrating the sustainability of biofuels because of two reasons. The first was because of a lack of capacities to implement legislation in EU member states, and the second was because the member states did not share the Commission’s vision of biofuels as a viable means of achieving the renewable energy targets set out in the 2003 Biofuels Directive. The analysis furthermore shows that orchestration is used as a governance m...
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Ambiente & Sociedade, 2019
This article proposes an analytical tool to assess the evolution of environmental governance mechanisms. The institutional path of certification systems is driven by three pre-existing variables that interact to determine the evolution of environmental governance: public regulations, industry competition and organisation, and legitimation mechanisms. Competition among certification systems results in the convergence of public and private environmental regulations, which tend to move towards the median demand for sustainability standards. This framework is later applied to the still incipient sector of biofuels, seeking to predict the certification schemes that have better chances to prevail. As an important normative implication, the efficacy of environmental governance depends on compliance costs for producers and, consequently, hinges on prevailing public regulations. These regulations must be designed not only by accounting for their direct effects but also by considering their i...
The Rationality of Biofuel Certification: A Critical Examination of EU Biofuel Policy
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2015
Certification for biofuels has been developed to ensure that biofuel production methods adhere to social and environmental sustainability standards. As such, requiring biofuel production to be certified has become part of EU policy through the 2009 renewable energy directive (RED), that aims to promote energy security, reduce emissions and promote rural development. According to the EU RED, in 2020 10 % of our transport energy should come from renewable sources, most of which are expected to be biofuels. In this paper I examine what biofuel certificates are, what they can achieve and what their limitations are. Methodologically, I will evaluate them using the standards of instrumental, practical and communicative rationality. With regard to instrumental rationality, I conclude that the EU RED makes an important but unjustified assumption in demanding certified biofuels for its target: that if biofuel production is sustainable, then biofuel use is too. I also argue that, where the EU assumes that biofuel certification is a sufficient means to achieve the EU RED's goals, it is at best an insufficient means and at worst not a means at all towards achieving these goals. With regard to practical rationality, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to trade-offs between different goals in the EU RED, particularly with regard to providing investor security and not capping transport energy consumption. With regard to communicative rationality, I argue that the policy-making process of the EU RED has been seriously flawed, and that certification development processes also can improve significantly.
Biofuels, sustainability and trade-related regulatory chill
Recent European Union sustainability criteria for biofuels provide an opportunity to understand more precisely the relationship between national sustainable development policies and World Trade Organization (WTO) law. A desire to avoid WTO conflict was one reason for the omission of stronger criteria addressing negative social and environmental impacts of increased biofuels production. Thus, despite declarations of sustainable development’s central importance in WTO legal texts and statements by the Secretariat, national sustainability regulations risked trade law conflict. This article documents potential reasons for a WTO regulatory chill effect on the sustainability criteria. It then outlines challenges that the regulatory concept poses to trade law, which result primarily from its breadth and complexity, as well as the lack of targeted international standards, and its emphasis on production processes which intrude heavily, in an extraterritorial sense, on importers. It is important to identify these limitations to the mutual supportiveness between trade liberalization and national policies to achieve sustainability goals. However, despite these limitations, the case study also suggests that, with regard to sustainability criteria, sustainable development’s soft power as a WTO legal principle is an important source of influence.
International Journal of Accounting Research
Biofuels are currently at the Centre stage of attention for policy makers and climate concerned end-users seeking more sustainable energy source for sustainable environment. This is because of its potential as an alternative and/or cleaner source of energy. However, questions are being raised about the capability of biofuels to achieve the dual goal of environmental and energy security without jeopardizing global food security. To set realistic target for future biofuel options, it is important to assess biofuel sustainability based on their prospects and implications on critical emerging issues such as energy supply security, climate change mitigation, biodiversity and ecosystem preservation, and food security. This paper presents a review of different governance approaches undertaken by the key actors in the biofuel industry (U.S. and EU) to address these emerging issues and regulate the sustainability of biofuel production. Two of such programmed were examined-The United States Renewable Fuel Standard [U.S. RFS], and the European Union Renewable Energy Directive [EU-RED]. Efforts were made to examine the related environmental and economic implications of their policy initiatives and governance processes with a view to determining their outcomes across a wide range of stakeholders. Emphasis was placed on binding regulations and standardized mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral agreements at the global level.