Public Policy and the Governance of Biofuel Systems

Sammanfattning: The dependency of transport on oil fuels is responsible for risks of energy supply security, and local, regional and global environmental problems, including the emission of greenhouse gases affecting the Earth’s climate system. Biofuels attracted considerable attention in recent years as a solution to these problems. However, the deployment of biofuel technologies poses as many opportunities to be exploited as risks to be avoided, and this generates important concerns in a world seeking solutions to its energy, environmental and food challenges. The fine balance between benefits and harms is expected to be mastered by government policies and this generates great expectations on the capacity of policy-makers to control the process and steer biofuels away from undesirable scenarios. In this context, the overarching aim of my doctoral thesis was to explore the functioning of public policies and programmes in the field of biofuels with the ambition of identifying ways to improve their governance. The thesis is based on five empirical studies aimed at examining biofuels policies and programmes in a sample of cases from industrialized countries, the EU, and industrializing countries, Mozambique and Brazil. The findings of these studies indicate that a large variety of problems hinder the performance of government interventions in the field of biofuels. Problems are found at all stages of the policy cycle in both industrialized and industrializing countries. Furthermore, the studies draw attention to how expectations and requirements placed on biofuels have increased in the period under analysis. From the empirical studies we conclude that biofuels are inherently difficult to govern. Concerning the systemic governability of biofuels, the results indicate that governance has become more problematic in the period analysed. The system that public policies are meant to govern is highly diverse, complex and covers the entire globe. Governors are poorly equipped to deal with such challenges, especially at international level. The analysis of biofuel governance also reveals that there are potential opportunities that can be exploited to improve the performance of biofuel policies and programmes. Two complementary directions for improvement are highlighted: improve governing capacity and reduce governance needs. It is concluded that if biofuels can contribute to a low-carbon/oil free future transport system, we must improve our capacity to direct and steer their production and use. However, even if other transport technologies, e.g. electric vehicles, become dominant, the lessons learned from the case of biofuels will still prove useful if, or rather when, similar societal scrutiny is applied to other natural resource-based production systems.