Beyond the Sustainability of Exception: Setting Bounds on Biofuels (original) (raw)
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Ever since the term "sustainable development" has appeared on the political agenda in the 1980s, it has become ever more vague and indefinite. Nonetheless, it became and remained a somewhat obligatory term in terms of substantiating and legitimizing political action. However, what kind of political action is adopted under the name of sustainable development differs substantially from case to case and is a matter of political struggle. Biofuels policy in Germany and the EU is one specific example of this development. Until the mid-2000s, biofuels were widely recognized as being inherently sustainable. However, as many of the positive effects of using an increased amount of biofuels were more and more put into question, ways of safeguarding the sustainability of biofuels had to be found. In other words, the discursive battle field of biofuels policy was reopened and the way for a political struggle between conflicting conceptions of a sustainable biofuel was paved. One part of this struggle was the adoption of binding sustainability criteria for biofuels by the EU in 2009. But which conception of a sustainable biofuel and which underlying narratives and worldviews does this policy decision actually represent? And does this mean that the struggle for hegemony on this issue is over and 'won' by somebody?
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The demand for biofuels has expanded rapidly worldwide due to increased interests in energy security, climate change mitigation, and rural development. The increasing production of and trade in biofuels have had immense consequences worldwide, e.g. massive land-use changes impacting on forests, biodiversity and climate, and important socio-economic impacts such as land evictions, competition with food production, and food insecurity. Even though individually each of these issues has received attention in the literature, biofuel governance discussions remain rare. This article identifies this gap through a broad and systematic literature review, which adds to a more rapid policy review that examines the existing biofuel governance framework at the international level. Our examination reveals that governance is scattered in many bilateral and some supranational frameworks. However, a structured framework is seen as important because: (a) the driving forces for biofuels are largely glo...
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Since the 1990s governments in both the Global North and the Global South have been heavily promoting liquid biofuels and enacting policies as a result of concerns related to climate change mitigation, energy security, and rural development. Policy discourses about future technological pathways and landscapes have also been based on framing the lack of energy as an impediment to development and growth (Smith, 2010; Wilkinson and Herrera, 2010). Liquid biofuels have been portrayed as an attractive technological pathway because they can address disparate problems at once without fundamentally altering prevailing energy consumption practices (Smith, 2010; White and Dasgupta, 2010). They are already a major ‘renewable’ energy source in the United States, Brazil, and the European Union where they are presented as a way to sustainably transition away from fossil fuels in the future (Birch and Calvert, forthcoming).
The present study is concerned with the expansion of biofuel production and two revealing and contrasting impacts caused in Honduras. The biofuels complex emerges as a sustainable alternative to cope with pressing problems related to climate change, energy insecurity and environmental degradation. However such an argument becomes problematic as land expansion for biofuels entails land-use changes and limitations to land tenure and access to the rural poor. The latter is recently known as the phenomenon of land grabbing in developing countries. The problematic to tackle around these biofuels’ impacts is captured in two cases in Honduras. The first one, showing a case in which biofuel expansion has created political conflict, displacement and dispossession for rural communities and peasants struggling for land. On the other hand, another case shows a small-scale project that enhances sustainable development and socially inclusive results. The study compares the contrasting impacts based on empirical data from reports and studies about both cases. The aim is to understand the differences of both cases from a critique neoliberalism and a from a social sustainable development approach in order to analyse the reasons behind those differences. My argument draws on the assumption of an existent convergence of actors and approaches which are intrinsically materialized on the contrasting impacts. Therefore actors and approaches play key roles in those differentiated impacts. The study also reveals the emerging complexities around biofuels with key roles played by the state, governments and international organizations in developing countries.