Event Title
Biofuels Governance: Insufficient Legal Instruments or Innovative International Governance System?
Location
Rooom 205
Start Date
4-7-2012 10:15 AM
End Date
4-7-2012 12:00 PM
Description
High-technology biofuels pose many risks to the environment and to social justice, and many of these risks have been crystallised particularly with impacts upon poorer communities and high value threatened ecosystems. At the same time technological advances in biofuels potentially offer significant benefits in terms of energy security, economic benefits for primary producers in developed and developing countries, new industrial ecologies that can convert waste streams into beneficial uses, and the use of biorefining to produce both fuel and high-value by-products including foods and medicines. An effective governance system for biofuels would allow the realisation of the benefits but control the costs and risks.
The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law has attempted to come to grips with these challenges with a series of scholarly events, which have stimulated the thinking for this paper. The emerging biofuel industry challenges our concepts of legal governance for a number of reasons:
projections for the industry suggest that biofuels governance will need to be effective in guiding and controlling the actions of an industry that will be of the scale of the petroleum industry, and even more technologically sophisticated.
This industry will be led by some of the strongest corporations in the industrial world, but at the same time is likely to draw on the landscapes and resources that are currently serve the essential needs of the poor, or of creatures that have no effective political or economic voice.
the industry paradigm itself is highly heterogoneous and rapidly evolving, with radically different models for feedstock production and sourcing, processing, bioprocessing, commercial structures and end-use. It is difficult to know what to govern, and many of the key elements in the future paradigm are closely guarded secrets of major corporations.
Governments are at a significant disadvantage in attempting to govern this industry, in terms of economic imbalance, jurisdictional constraints, competing fundamental goals of intervention, and information assymetry. Traditional instruments are likely to be insufficient to ensure effective governance.
Whilst there are many standards and other industry-led initiatives in process, there are fundamental reasons why these may also prove to be desirable but insufficient as the basis for governance. This is not least of all because the industry itself will consist of highly variegated industrial ecologies operated by powerful and highly varied industry participants in different countries.
This paper considers the totality of the biofuels governance challenges. It suggests that whilst various traditional elements will be necessary, they will be insufficient to the impending governance task. The paper outlines an alternative conceptual model based upon system-focused ‘smart regulation’. Taking into account empirical research conducted around biofuels weeds, the paper will then consider the specific legal and institutional impediments that any such innovation will encounter.
Finally, the paper will outline the implications of these issues for natural resource governance using the law, more generally as an illustration of the extent of change that is likely to be needed in legal instruments, institutions and strategy (and the scholarship of these) to cope with the radically different contexts that are emerging which do challenge our assumptions about the capacity of environmental law.
Biofuels Governance: Insufficient Legal Instruments or Innovative International Governance System?
Rooom 205
High-technology biofuels pose many risks to the environment and to social justice, and many of these risks have been crystallised particularly with impacts upon poorer communities and high value threatened ecosystems. At the same time technological advances in biofuels potentially offer significant benefits in terms of energy security, economic benefits for primary producers in developed and developing countries, new industrial ecologies that can convert waste streams into beneficial uses, and the use of biorefining to produce both fuel and high-value by-products including foods and medicines. An effective governance system for biofuels would allow the realisation of the benefits but control the costs and risks.
The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law has attempted to come to grips with these challenges with a series of scholarly events, which have stimulated the thinking for this paper. The emerging biofuel industry challenges our concepts of legal governance for a number of reasons:
projections for the industry suggest that biofuels governance will need to be effective in guiding and controlling the actions of an industry that will be of the scale of the petroleum industry, and even more technologically sophisticated.
This industry will be led by some of the strongest corporations in the industrial world, but at the same time is likely to draw on the landscapes and resources that are currently serve the essential needs of the poor, or of creatures that have no effective political or economic voice.
the industry paradigm itself is highly heterogoneous and rapidly evolving, with radically different models for feedstock production and sourcing, processing, bioprocessing, commercial structures and end-use. It is difficult to know what to govern, and many of the key elements in the future paradigm are closely guarded secrets of major corporations.
Governments are at a significant disadvantage in attempting to govern this industry, in terms of economic imbalance, jurisdictional constraints, competing fundamental goals of intervention, and information assymetry. Traditional instruments are likely to be insufficient to ensure effective governance.
Whilst there are many standards and other industry-led initiatives in process, there are fundamental reasons why these may also prove to be desirable but insufficient as the basis for governance. This is not least of all because the industry itself will consist of highly variegated industrial ecologies operated by powerful and highly varied industry participants in different countries.
This paper considers the totality of the biofuels governance challenges. It suggests that whilst various traditional elements will be necessary, they will be insufficient to the impending governance task. The paper outlines an alternative conceptual model based upon system-focused ‘smart regulation’. Taking into account empirical research conducted around biofuels weeds, the paper will then consider the specific legal and institutional impediments that any such innovation will encounter.
Finally, the paper will outline the implications of these issues for natural resource governance using the law, more generally as an illustration of the extent of change that is likely to be needed in legal instruments, institutions and strategy (and the scholarship of these) to cope with the radically different contexts that are emerging which do challenge our assumptions about the capacity of environmental law.