Dr. Ackrill paper (*.pdf)

Agreement was undertaken by means of emphasising aspects of biofuels policy to
which domestic constituencies would be most receptive.
Another important aspect of governments’ operational capacity is the ability to
respond to changes in market conditions. Expansion of trade, changes in the direction
of trade flows, and concerns over sustainability, all raise the possibility that domestic
policies could be affected in increasing ways by transnational politics. The question
then becomes how those transnational factors might influence domestic policy change
and, thus, domestic policy-makers’ capacity to accommodate and deliver such change
(this also embraces Reflection Capacity, considered below). For example, were a
certification scheme to gain a global foothold that was inconsistent with an importer’s
sustainable production standard, network effects around the adoption of such a
standard in different markets may potentially be sufficiently powerful that importers
may just have to submit to the private sector standard: public governance may, in
some cases, have to adapt to developments in private governance.
In considering the co-ordinating mechanisms to implement the policy in each
jurisdiction and how this has left both policy areas susceptible to fragmentation
through sustainability concerns (which, in turn, have different meanings and scope in
the EU and US), the initial policy design is brought into analytical focus. This
included various policy objectives – implicitly and explicitly – such as rural
development, energy security, and GHG emissions reduction that were managed
intertemporally. This strategy required the bridge between the two stages, of 1G and
advanced biofuels, to be credible for co-ordinated implementation. Without this,
spillovers between the different temporal dimensions of the policy may arise and
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