Elsevier

Energy for Sustainable Development

Volume 29, December 2015, Pages 118-126
Energy for Sustainable Development

Between redeemer and work of the devil: The transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2015.10.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Biofuels have been the subject of heated political discussions, but also of a growing literature on discourses and environmental policies. Previous studies on the issue have, however, neglected the fact that the different discourses about on biofuels are increasingly crossing national boundaries, i.e., that there is a tendency toward transnationalization. In the light of this development the present article analyzes the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse in the period 2005–2011 with a special emphasis on actors from Brazil, the EU and the USA. By conducting a discourse analysis along the lines of Hajer, five discourse coalitions can be distinguished, each providing a different view on the opportunities, problems and perspectives of biofuel production in Brazil. It is observed that the long-established hegemony of the discourse coalition of biofuel supporters was successfully challenged by a more critical position during the food crisis of 2007/2008. As a result, the discourse coalition of critical supporters—which was committed to sustainable biofuel production via political regulation—prevailed in the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse and its position was translated into policy measures.

Introduction

Biofuels, once considered to be the ‘green’ hope for the future, have been transformed into a highly controversial topic. Recently, they gained attention when the US military announced its intention to use an increasing amount of biofuels for running drones, aircrafts and battleships or when biofuels were considered to be a crucial motivation for land grabbing (Carrington, 2012, Anseeuw et al., 2012).

All these discussions are embedded in a more comprehensive and global debate on biofuels that is conducted not only in individual countries and specific sectors but in international forums and the broader public as well. In this context Brazil is one of the most important protagonists, both as subject and promoter of these debates (Kojima and Johnson, 2006). The country's role can be explained by its importance as the world's largest exporter and second largest producer of ethanol1 for use as fuel in automobile engines (WBGU, 2009: 39, 206). Brazil already started to produce biofuels on a larger scale when the government initiated a comprehensive ethanol program (Programa Nacional do Álcool—PROÁLCOOL) in the face of falling sugar prices and the oil crisis 1973. After having a tough time in the 1980s and 1990s, the production of biofuels increased dramatically after the introduction of flex-fuel vehicles running on an arbitrary mix of gasoline and hydrogenated ethanol in 2003 and the rise of petroleum and gasoline prices in the earlier 2000s (Giersdorf, 2009, Giersdorf and Nitsch, 2006, Martines-Filho et al., 2006, Novaes, 2007). In 2002, the Brazilian government initiated a biodiesel program, which aimed inter alia at integrating smallholder agriculture into biofuel production (Pousa et al., 2007).

In line with recent scholarship that established the importance of discourses for global environmental politics, this article takes a discourse-analytical and policy-oriented approach in order to analyze Brazilian biofuels (e.g., Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, 2006, Hajer, 1995). It assumes that the relevant political actors—governments and oppositions representatives, lobbyists, social activists and even consumers—act according to how they perceive and evaluate the world, while these very perceptions and evaluations are in turn influenced by (dominant) discourses (Hajer and Versteeg, 2005). This is shown for instance by Pülzl (2003), who discusses how discursive changes influenced international forest policy within the United Nations and how this led to an institutional response. Fischer (2003) convincingly claims that the use of discursive techniques reveals the social construction of policies. Schmidt et al. (2005) emphasize the importance of public discourses for social democratic reform projects (see Schmidt, 2008 and Hajer, 2008 for other examples). Thus, also biofuel policies and its acceptance are dependent on predominant discursive structures. It is precisely these aspects that are analyzed in this article focusing on biofuel production in Brazil as a pioneering country in the promotion and production of biofuels. But instead of focusing on the narrowly national biofuel discourse in Brazil, we acknowledge the various relations between the discourses on Brazilian biofuels in Brazil, the EU and partly in the US (e.g., Bastos Lima and Gupta, 2013).

We thus analyze the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse which is (re)produced by Brazilian, European, and US-American actors. It comprises

  • a)

    all statements on biofuels made by Brazilian actors that either directly refer to the EU and/or the USA or explicitly address relevant actors in the USA and/or the EU by their form (e.g., internet and media reports, presentations in the respective countries), language (mainly English), and contents (e.g., the promotion of or critical warnings against Brazilian biofuels); and

  • b)

    all statements on biofuels made by US-American or European actors that directly or indirectly refer to Brazil.

The main questions to be posed in this article are: Which discourse coalitions can be identified in the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse between 2005 and 2011? Which discourse coalitions dominated the discourse at which point of time? To underscore the strength of our approach, we will also partially show how policy changes can be explained by changes in discursive structures. Since the US discourse is mainly concerned with US biofuels and makes only minor references to Brazilian ones, the article mainly, but not exclusively focuses on the Brazilian and the European parts of the discourse. Within the EU, the focus is on Germany due to its pioneering role in the promotion and production of biofuels and because of the manageability of the data, but other EU member states are considered as well (e.g., Kaup and Selbmann, 2010).

The present article is divided into five sections: The introduction is followed by a short overview of the key discourse-analytical terms. In part three, at first the existing literature on the topic is discussed and the research question developed, after which the study's research procedure is described. Afterwards, the results of the discourse analysis are discussed. Finally, a conclusion is drawn.

Section snippets

Basic concepts of discourse analysis

In order to analyze the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse, we particularly applied the argumentative discourse analysis as developed by Hajer (1995). The discourse theory underlying this method basically takes an anti-realist or anti-essentialist stand. It assumes that there is a true (physical) reality, but that humans can never access this reality directly and objectively. Instead, human perceptions and interpretations of physical reality are always shaped by mutually accepted rules,

State of research and research deficits

Although no research has been conducted on the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse thus far, several discourse analyses on the subject of biofuels in Brazil, the USA, and the EU exist.

Worldwide the WBGU differentiates between three biofuel-related discourses: (a) The environmental policy discourse considers bioenergy, and thus biofuels, as a contribution to climate protection, but it also increasingly serves as a platform for skeptical voices criticizing the actual carbon footprint of

Findings and discussion

The findings obtained by analyzing the actors' statements were matched with the insights gained through the analysis of the literature. With regard to the transnational Brazilian biofuel discourse, a total of five discourse coalitions could be distinguished, which are discussed in greater details below.

Conclusion

By using Hajer's discourse theoretic and analytical framework, we were able to show that the discourse about Brazilian biofuels has transnationalized yet, and that the resulting transnational discursive space was made up out of five different discourse coalitions in the period 2005–2011, namely biofuels supporters, skeptical supporters, “consequences for the global community” critics, “consequences for the local community” critics and critical opponents (see Table 1 for an overview). Under the

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