Biofuels are the subject of many, sometimes heated debates touching on many pressing issues of our time, such as climate change or land-use. However, there is uncertainty as to whether biofuels in these respects are rather part of the solution or part of the problem. Despite this uncertainty, biofuels have in recent years still been vigorously promoted in Germany as well as in the EU. What can be observed, however, is that a discursive shift has taken place in the mid-2000s when biofuels developed from a niche option fo agricultural production to the silver bullet for fighting a whole range of problems. After roughly outlining the backgrounds of this development, I use the discourse coalitions approach to analyse this discursive shift in Germany and the EU. Based mainly on document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, I examine which story lines are at the centre of this discursive shift, which actors put forward these story lines and in the context of which practices this happens. Subsequently, the main thrust of this paper is the relation of the discursive shifts on both levels to one another. How and through which practices are they connected? Results of this analysis indicate that, even though they are to a certain extent distinct, some discursive as well as institutional practices, such as story lines of large scale marketization and efficiency or practices of collective policy-making, are mutually enhancing the respective discursive shifts. Regarded in the broader context of the multi-level polity of the EU, these results shed some light on the relation between the supranational level and the member states as regards politics and policy-making processes as well as on power relations in this context. A discussion on this and a brief impetus on potential further research are presented in the concluding chapter of the paper.
