Keeping things different: coexistence within European markets for cleantech and biofuels
Résumé
Environmental policy increasingly resorts to market-based instruments in
order to meet sustainability objectives. The ‘carbon market’ instituted by
the European Emissions Trading directive from 2003 is a canonical
example, which has been described, and critiqued, as a delegation of
policy objectives to market exchanges. In this paper, we examine the
complex ways in which the operationalization of policy objectives and
the organization of markets are intertwined, focusing on two other
examples of European environmental regulation. The first one is the
Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive from 1996, which
defined the ‘best available techniques’ to curb emissions in air, water
and soil. The second one is the Renewable Energy Directive from 2009,
which introduced criteria for the definition of the sustainability of
biofuels. Through the analysis of the design and implementation of
these two directives, we identify a central concern for the coexistence
of various objects, and various initiatives undertaken by European
institutions, member states and private actors. We use the notion of
coexistence to describe a European political and economic ordering that
is inherently hybrid, and cannot be reduced to a mere delegation of
policy objectives to the market, or a legal constraint imposed on all
European actors. It grounds its political legitimacy and economic
rationality on the distribution of roles and responsibilities across public
and private actors, and on the ability to ‘keep things different’ according to local variabilities