The EU has been lauded as a leader in environmental and sustainability policy by having developed quite strict regulation in several issue areas, such as climate change, chemicals, and waste policy. In addition, the EU has often been identified as a global policy leader in the sense of having shaped policy making beyond its own borders. One area in which the EU’s environmental leadership role has been acknowledged – at least from a comparative perspective – is in the area of biofuels governance. While excluding social and food security criteria, the EU has developed quite strict sustainability criteria for biofuels production, which besides greenhouse gas savings targets also include restrictions on the type of land on which biofuels can be grown. In addition, the EU’s biofuels policy has shaped private biofuels governance by integrating private certification systems into its policy design and as such influencing these private initiatives’ institutional development and business uptake. Despite this leadership role, however, the EU has largely failed to significantly shape sustainable biofuels policy developments at the global level and in other jurisdictions. Our paper ask why this is the case.
Theoretically, we embed our paper in the debate on the two main pathways through which the EU is argued to shape policy beyond its own borders: the EU’s normative power in terms of supporting and diffusing global norms, such as sustainable development (e.g., Manners 2002); and the EU’s market power in terms of both market size and regulatory capacity within this market (e.g., Damro 2012; Bach and Newman 2007). We argue that even though both sides of the theoretical debate would predict policy influence beyond EU borders, we do not see this materialized. Empirically, we draw from domestic policy developments in the US and Brazil – two important biofuels producers - and international policy developments at the level of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP). We argue that to understand the EU’s failure in influencing policy developments in these other jurisdictions and internationally, we need to focus on the interactions between three factors: the scientifically and politically contested nature of the sustainability impacts of biofuels production; the timing of policy developments, whereby the EU was a relative late-mover; and the specificity of the trade relations between the three jurisdictions, largely prohibiting a trading-up effect (Vogel 1995). In this regard, the paper intends to contribute to the debate on the conditions for the EU to be a global policy shaper, and the literature on the sustainability challenges of biofuels governance.
