EU Biofuels Policy as a Zombie Policy – Resurrection by Renationalization?

In the context of rising oil prices, agricultural surpluses and climate change, biofuels appeared on the European policy agenda as a potential solution to multiple problems in the 2000s. Therefore, extensive support policies have been adopted, primarily the Renewable Energy Directive (RED I). Subsequently, however, the potential downsides of using biofuels became visible and the biofuels ‘win-win’ narrative was questioned increasingly. Rather than being the solution to multiple problems, biofuels themselves became a multiple problem, allegedly responsible for land-grabbing or rising food prices. This ambivalence is reflected both in the 2015 ILUC directive, which set a 7% cap for conventional biofuels, and in the 2018 recast of the RED I, the RED II, which largely stopped further growth of the sector, while maintaining already existing support schemes. Thus, EU biofuels policy might be an example of a “zombie policy” that is “so devoid of content that, although inscribed on paper, (…) [it is] in reality dead” (Bob 2012: 32), based on a “zombie idea” that, “although largely unproven in practice, tend[s] to survive and to be adopted again and again” (Peters/Nagel 2020: 2-3). In this paper, I firstly enhance the concept of zombie policies by equipping it with some theoretical background and conceptual features. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with political actors in Brussels and Berlin, I apply this framework to EU biofuels policy and show to what extent it features traits of such a zombie policy. Secondly, I ask as to whether this “zombieization” at the EU level is accompanied by a renationalization of European biofuels policy that might lead to the resurrection of biofuels policy in certain member states. Using Germany as an example, I more specifically look at the interdependencies of policy negotiation processes both before the adoption of the RED II and during its current implementation at the national level. On the one hand, the phasing-out of conventional biofuels proposed in the 2016 RED II proposal significantly influenced the negotiations on the cap for conventional biofuels in Germany that had to be introduced based on the ILUC directive. As negotiations at the EU level progressed, however, and Parliament and Council adopted their opinions that proposed sticking to the 7% cap, this changed the negotiations between the ministries involved in implementing the ILUC directive and their outcome. The RED II, on the other hand, in line with the general EU governance approach to energy and climate policy, leaves much more leeway to member states as regards setting goals and ways to achieve them, which currently fuels some actors’ hopes of a resurgence of a national biofuels policy in Germany. I close by reflecting on the relation between the apparent “zombieization” of biofuels policy on the European level and its renationalization and on what it reveals regarding the EU’s climate and energy transition and its governance more generally. Literature: Bob, C. (2012): The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics. Cambridge. Peters, B.G.; Nagel, M.L. (2020): Zombie Ideas: Why Failed Policy Ideas Persist. Cambridge.