Consistent, strategic policy development is a challenging project. Even in a relatively constrained policy subsector, such as transportation biofuels, the horizontal linkages to other policy sectors (including rural development, agriculture, innovation, and trade policy, to name only the most obvious) and the vertical linkages to regional and global governance networks will likely introduce significant complexity. And, even in the absence of sustainability considerations, the result is often a suboptimal policy mix, where multiple and contradictory policy goals are combined with a variety of mutually incompatible policy instruments. The introduction of sustainability goals to biofuels policies around the world and the addition of certification to the tight mix of regulatory and incentive instruments originally designed for industrial support would seem a classic case in point. While much of this literature points in the direction of the search for more "integrated" policies, the possibility of living with fragmentation and managing complexity is also open. As Rob Hoppe has argued, the key here is metagovernance strategies that exploit layering and conversion in order to manage complementarity and hierarchy between institutions and policy mixes This paper build on Hoppe’s suggestion by exploring the mechanisms of layering and conversion, including well-known ones such as effective subsidiarity arrangements, and a less well known mechanism, the phenomenon of "patched" architectures that create opportunities to introduce incremental change to sub-optimal policy mixes, steering towards sustainability goals without trying to replace the policy mix and overturn the institutions all at once. Combining a static snapshot of the current biofuels policy mix with a dynamic analysis of intentional changes in governance produces both a familiar picture of the emergence of a confused biofuels policy mix but also a less familiar one of a transition pathway accessible by metagovernance strategies that exploit opportunities created by fragmented governance architectures.
