Seeing Like a Standard: EU, sustainable biofuels, and land use change in Africa Marie Widengård School of Global Studies Gothenburg University [email protected] Andrea Nightingale Department of Urban and Rural Development Swedish University of Agricultural Science (SLU) [email protected] Peter Roberntz WWF Sweden [email protected] Tobias Edman Geografiska Informationsbyrån [email protected] Allan Carlson WWF Sweden [email protected] Published with Creative Commons licence: Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivatives 50 Seeing Like a Standard Abstract Biofuels have expanded across the globe, generating a range of concerns in the places of production. One approach to controlling the effects of biofuel production has been sustainability standards. This article takes a ‘seeing like’ approach to analyse how the EU Sustainability standard contributes to narrowing the vision of what sustainable biofuels are. Six biofuel cases in Africa are examined through the lens of the standard, using remote sensing to investigate the criteria on land use and canopy cover change. The standard view is also compared to on ground views regarding the sustainability of the projects. The effects of seeing like the EU standard are two: 1) diluted seeing, which prioritises global environmental problems over more nuanced social and institutional aspects; and 2) distributed seeing, which transforms standardised sustainable biofuels into multiple, uncertain forms because of hybrid governance. High carbon losses due to biofuel projects were detected, but at the same time, the standard simplifies and skips over wider problems related to unsustainable biofuel projects. Keywords Biofuels; land use change; standards; sustainability criteria; EU; sub-Saharan Africa Introduction How do standards ‘see’ sustainable biofuels? By ‘seeing like a standard’, this article seeks to expand our knowledge of how standards diffuse the meaning of sustainable biofuels. The idea that standards are necessary for sustainable biofuels emerged as a range of concerns related to biofuel crop production emerged in the early 2000’s, such as problematic land use changes leading to deforestation, loss of biodiversity, carbon emissions, displacements, food insecurity, and so forth. A large number sustainability standards and certification schemes were launched to enable states and other actors to ‘see’ and control the impacts of biofuel production (Scarlat and Dallemand, 2011). This is how many see sustainable biofuels today, through a standard grid that makes legible biofuel plantations in faraway places. In this article, we take a ‘seeing like’ approach to understand the standard mode of governing, which draws on James Scott’s argument that the ability to govern relies on ‘seeing’ and making subjects legible for rule. In ‘Seeing like a state’ (1998), Scott details how states try to engineer societies, forests, agricultures and cities into standardised, bureaucratic realities, only to fail precisely because planners created a distorted picture of society and nature which distances themselves from local, interested, contextual, and historically specific realities. 51 ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2018, 17(1): 49-87 Drawing on Scott, we probe the role of standards in making sustainable biofuel production legible for schematic knowledge and control; in short we attempt to look at biofuels through the lens of international standards in order to ‘see’ what the standard sees. By ‘seeing like a standard’, we can therefore increase our understanding of how criteria, control and verification contribute to narrowing our vision of what sustainable biofuels are. With this in mind, we decided to look closer at one of the meta-standards for sustainable biofuels, namely the standard of the European Union (EU). Beginning in the early 2000s, EU policymakers introduced targets for renewable energy in all forms of transport, and later added to these policies a set of mandatory sustainability criteria for biofuel crop production. These criteria were issued simultaneously through the Renewable Energy Directive (EU-RED) 2009/28/EC (Articles 17-19) and Fuel Quality Directive (EU-FQD) 2009/30/EC (Article 7b-d). This standard applies to biofuel and bioliquids sold within the EU, including biomaterial produced beyond the EU. By controlling the large EU market, the standard can partly govern the rules of global biofuel production (Di Lucia, 2010). The standard may therefore ‘orchestrate’ how sustainable biofuels are viewed and practiced globally (Schleifer, 2013). The standard is not innocent in this sense, as it aspires control at-a-distance. Our contribution is in understanding how the standard seeks to sanction, permit and create a particular form of sustainable biofuels, which justifies specific values, authorities, expertise, and technologies, while blocking out others. In this article, we ask what the EU ‘sees’ through the standard, and what it misses seeing, given that standards are not all-seeing but quite selective in their view. Whereas earlier studies have shown that the standard offers an EU-centric and partial definition of sustainability, leaving issues such as livelihoods, equity, water and rural development aside (Franco et al., 2010; Hunsberger et al., 2013; Larsen et al., 2013; Levidow, 2013), few have extended the analysis to ask how the EU has codified ‘sustainable biofuels’ into a legible and administratively more convenient format that allows greater control of biofuels as a whole. In part one; we therefore identify the criteria through which sustainable biofuels are read. We find that sustainable biofuel production has been made intelligible through a grid of greenhouse gas (GHG) and land use change (LUC), and we discuss the reasons behind this simplified rendering and the control mechanisms. Given the focus on LUC, it is noteworthy that earlier research has been doubtful to the efficiency of standards to control LUC (Pavlovskaia, 2014). In part two, we investigate how the LUC criteria can be controlled, primarily through ‘remote seeing’ and specifically how the criterion on canopy cover change (CCC) is assessed using Earth Observation (EO) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The CCC criterion is central to the standard as it benchmarks the maximum forest crown cover which can be cleared for sustainable biofuel production. We examine the degree of CCC in six biofuel cases, namely for 52 Seeing Like a Standard plantations of the oil crop Jatropha curcas L. located within or near Miombo woodlands and coastal forests in Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya. Moreover, in our attempt to understand the standard optic and what is missed, we briefly explore on the ground views regarding the sustainability of the projects, by analysing media, civil society reports, official impact assessments, and interviews with local residents. Indeed, some have argued that high environmental standards have to a certain degree legitimised land acquisitions, later critiqued as ‘land grabbing’ and ‘green grabbing’ (Borras and Franco, 2012; Fairhead et al., 2012). Standards fuse in these ways into the wider governance by government agencies at local, state and union levels, private sustainability schemes, international organisations, NGOs, and economic operators. In our research, we find that the standard mode of governing has moved beyond Scott’s state-centric conceptualisation. Indeed, Scott’s ‘seeing like’ approach has been used extensively to explain the optics of governance beyond the state (Bridge, 2014), to examine the powers of private, non-governmental and international organisations and their technical devices of measurement, calculation and visualization (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012; Ferguson, 2005; Li, 2005; MacEachern, 2010; Schuller, 2007). Standards are part of a broader hybridisation of power, in which public and private authorities actively interact (Ponte et al., 2011b). Seeing like the EU standard resembles this diffusion of power, which both enables and constrains EU to ‘see’ beyond its borders. In our analysis, the effects of seeing like the EU standard are two: 1) diluted seeing, which prioritises global environmental problems, GHG emissions and biodiversity loss over more nuanced social and institutional aspects; and 2) distributed seeing, which transforms standardised sustainable biofuels into multiple, uncertain forms because of hybrid governance. In this view, we detected high carbon losses due to biofuel projects, but at the same time, the standard simplifies and skips over wider problems related to unsustainable projects. Seeing like a standard: EU and its sustainability criteria for biofuels Diluted seeing A key argument within the ‘seeing like’ literature is that knowledge and control require a simplified, narrowing of vision, that is, to bring into ‘sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality’ (Scott, 1998, 11). The literature on standards, audit and verification follow this logic to argue that the standard apparatus (its construction, content, form, shape, and technologies) reduces matters into simplified forms. On the one hand, standards can make sustainable biofuels legible by bringing into view critical matters of concern. On the other hand, standards are often criticised for using ‘universal’ and ‘science-based’ criteria and indicators to represent reality as qualitatively and quantitatively homogeneous (Power, 1997; Strathern, 2000). Standards also tend