The Need for Governance by Experimentation: The Case of Biofuels

The Need for Governance by Experimentation: The Case of Biofuels

Asveld, L.

Technology, Policy and Management

2016-03-04

The policies of the European Union concerning the development of biofuels can be termed a lock-in. Biofuels were initially hailed as a green, sustainability technology. However evidence to the contrary quickly emerged. The European Commission proposed to alter its policies to accommodate for these effects but met with fierce resistance from a considerable number of member states who have an economic interest in these first generation biofuels. In this paper I argue that such a lock-in might have been avoided if an experimental approach to governance had been adopted. Existing approaches such as anticipation and niche management either do not reduce uncertainty sufficiently or fail to explicitly address conflicts between values motivating political and economic support for new technologies. In this paper, I suggest to apply an experimental framework to the development of sustainable biobased technologies. Such an approach builds on insights from adaptive management and transition management in that it has the stimulation of learning effects at its core. I argue that these learning effects should occur on the actual impacts of new technologies, on the institutionalisation of new technologies and most specifically on the norms and values that underly policies supporting new technologies. This approach can be relevant for other emerging technologies.

biofuels
lock-in
governance by experimentation
learning effects
values

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5737affe-69f2-4573-a9f4-6ea1bc1f768f

Springer

1353-3452

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9729-y

Science and Engineering Ethics, 2016

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2016 The Author(s)
This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com