For my next trick I’ll need a volunteer: The role of ENGOs in integrating environmental concerns in the European biofuel policy through the European Parliament. Bruges Political Research Papers 55/2017

Vandenbussche, Thijs (2017) For my next trick I’ll need a volunteer: The role of ENGOs in integrating environmental concerns in the European biofuel policy through the European Parliament. Bruges Political Research Papers 55/2017. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

The transport sector remains an important frontier for the horizontal integration of environmental concerns in energy policy due to its greenhouse gas intensity and high energy consumption, with little technological alternatives to the internal combustion engine. The obstacles and opportunities for this horizontal integration, however, have received little scholarly attention from the field of political science. This paper aims to contribute through a case study of the problem of indirect land use change (ILUC), which curbed the initial enthusiasm of policy makers about the possibilities of biofuels to reduce transport emissions. We examine why and how the problem of ILUC entered the European agenda through a detailed document analysis complemented with a number of interviews, contending that environmental NGOs used their beneficial access to the European Parliament to put ILUC on the European agenda. We use the methodology of process tracing to establish the causal relation between these stakeholders’ strategies and the behaviour of the European Parliament. The results of this research show that ENGOs indeed played an important role in convincing the European Parliament to make an amendment on ILUC, but we suggest that coalition resources constituted another – so far hidden – driver. Finally, we sketch out some repercussions of the ILUC-dossier for the agenda setting power of the European Parliament.

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