A Tale of Institutional Fragmentation in Bioenergy Governance: Climate Clubs and the Establishment of the Biofuture Platform

Global sustainability governance is to a large degree driven by fragmentation, with international energy governance being no exception. There has been considerable debate in the literature as to what motivates actors to establish fragmented governance structures and processes to deal with transboundary global sustainability and other challenges. Dissatisfaction with the status quo has often been put forward as a necessary condition for institutional innovation. However, the pathways that lead from dissatisfaction to institutional reform and innovation require theoretical clarification. This paper fills this gap by examining the reasons that led Brazil to initiate the Biofuture Platform in 2016, a climate club aiming to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement by promoting international coordination on scaling up production of low carbon advanced fuels and other bioproducts. Building on interviews with relevant stakeholders, it argues that dissatisfaction with cooperative outcomes by the current configuration of institutions, as well as perceptions of focal international regulatory institutions as impermeable to change due to institutional capture by the interests of more powerful state and non-state actors, help explain why Brazil resorted to establishing a new institution in the global bioenergy policy domain. The contributions of this study to the literature are both theoretical, as well as empirical. First, it tests and extends existing theory on state dissatisfaction with the legitimacy of the status quo as a motivating factor for the creation of countervailing and overlapping international institutions. It does so by putting forward a model that looks at several explanatory factors such as, among others, availability of alternative pathways, capability to establish climate clubs, and pressure to challenge the status quo. Second, it adds to the empirical base by focusing on the specific case of the Biofuture Platform, a body which has so far received limited attention in the academic literature.