Description
Global sustainability governance is to a large degree driven by fragmentation, with international energy governance being no exception. There has been considerable debate in the literature as to what motivates actors to establish fragmented governance structures and processes to deal with transboundary global sustainability and other challenges. Dissatisfaction with the status quo has often been put forward as a necessary condition for institutional innovation. However, the pathways that lead from dissatisfaction to institutional reform and innovation require theoretical clarification.
This paper fills this gap by examining the reasons that led Brazil to initiate the Biofuture Platform in 2016, a body aiming to promote international coordination on scaling up production of low carbon advanced fuels and other bioproducts. It argues that dissatisfaction with cooperative outcomes by the current configuration of institutions, as well as perceptions of focal international regulatory institutions as being impermeable to change due to institutional capture by the interests of more powerful state and non-state actors, help explain why Brazil resorted to establishing a new institution in the global bioenergy policy domain.
The contributions of this study to the literature are both theoretical, as well as empirical. First, it tests and extends existing theory on state dissatisfaction with the status quo as a motivating factor for the creation of countervailing and overlapping international institutions by putting forward a model that looks at several explanatory factors such as, among others, capability and pressure to challenge the status quo. Second, it adds to the empirical base by focusing on the specific case of the Biofuture Platform, a body which has so far received limited attention in the academic literature.
