Turning Land into Carbon: Value Work and Carbon Accounting in the Construction of Sustainability in the Biofuels Market

In this paper we examine the value work and the evaluation methods and technologies underlying the categorization of biofuels in the market as “sustainable” and “unsustainable”, which had consequences for resource attraction, political support, and public acceptance. We focus on the qualification and quantification of the risk of indirect land use change (ILUC) as a potential effect of biofuels and how this risk was translated into amounts of carbon emissions savings which served as a basis for classifying biofuels in the market.

A main purpose of this state-organized standard market (Aspers, 2009) was to decarbonize the traffic fuels sector. Biofuels do not emit carbon dioxide (CO₂) when burned in engines and preserve scarce oil resources. However, biofuels were blamed for causing the destruction of rainforests, loss of biodiversity and escalating food prices, and also for aggravating hunger. Market organizers struggled under the spotlights of civil society and international organizations, which advocated the ban of those biofuels that were produced from the same materials as food and challenged the sustainability claims. The ILUC effect, examined in this paper, was constructed as a potential “change in demand for agricultural commodities in global markets” (European Commission, 2010) as manifested in the risk of displacement of food and feed production, caused by fuel production, which might result in the release of CO₂ from the soil and vegetation.

The trend of marketization to tackle societal issues in policy arrangements (Djelic, 2008) is observed in environmental policy when markets serve as “policy tools” (Levin & Espeland, 2002) for the purpose of “handling externalities” (Geiger, Harrison, Kjellberg & Mallard, 2014). Such policy-driven processes are characterized by “competing frames of meaning” and “contending interests and identities” (Hoffman & Ventresca, 1999). Furthermore, markets are political and cultural projects (Fligstein, 1996; Fourcade, 2007) and also arenas of moral conflicts and contentiousness (Fourcade & Healy, 2007; King & Pearce, 2010). The societal and environmental frames deployed in market creation by policy are moralizing dimensions of the design and emergence of market rules, which establish categories of worth that determine the legitimacy and appropriateness of the market and its products (Fourcade & Healy, 2007; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2013).

Valuation of products in markets is accomplished in evolving complex social processes that involve defining which dimensions of value matter the most and to whom and how these dimensions are articulated and by whom (Aspers, 2009; Beckert, 2009). Different modes of rationality reveal multiple, often contentious, ways of valuing (Espeland, 1998; Alexius & Tamm-Hallström, 2014; King & Pearce, 2010) associated with multiple hierarchies or orders of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006/1991; Stark, 2000). Value plurality presents challenges for market exchange and organizing, which create ground for the emergence of value work through which actors try to shape which values are present and how they are ordered (Alexius & Tamm-Hallström, 2014). Hence, valuation is empirically variable, subject to conflict, and contingent to technology change and political action of interest groups (Fourcade & Healy, 2007; MacKenzie, 2009; Weber, Rao & Thomas, 2009).

Value work is reflected in the models, instruments, tools and processes through which products are evaluated or assessed in terms of their worth (Espeland, 1998; Fourcade, 2011; Lamont, 2012; Beckert & Musselin, 2013; Alexius & Tamm-Halström, 2014). Evaluation involves an extraordinary amount of disciplinary, cognitive and cultural work (Levin & Espeland, 2002). For instance, in the design of pollution permits markets, their underlying evaluative technologies and models enabled all units of a gas emitted anywhere, at any future time, to be made commensurable (Levin & Espeland, 2002; Engels, 2006; MacKenzie, 2009). Commensuration involves turning qualities into quantities (Porter, 1995; Espeland & Stevens, 2008) and generating metrics and classification systems with the support of mathematical models, technologies, and measuring devices (MacKenzie, 2009) and of scientific knowledge that rationalizes uncertainty in complex phenomena (Drori and Meyer, 2006). The resulting categories of worth shape strategies deployed by market actors (Espeland & Sauder, 2007) and affect the distribution of resources (Beckert and Aspers, 2011).

Thus, we ask: how do different values engaged in the debate on land use for fuel production are negotiated and reveal multiple orders of worth? How does this value work translate into the technologies and modelling used in the carbon accounting of biofuel products, and ultimately into the evaluation of the sustainability of biofuels and formation of biofuel categories?

The research presented in this paper followed a longitudinal qualitative methodology (Langley, 1999; Miles, Huberman & Saldaña, 2014). We collected data from digital archives (legislation, policy documents, public consultation documents, European Parliament minutes, expert workshop materials, expert reports, and stakeholders’ position papers; period 2008-2015), observations at a three-day industry event and at a measurement facility, and five interviews with key actors (producers, industry associations, non-governmental organizations and scientific experts). We built a chronology of events for the period of analysis (2008-2015), mapped different stages of the debate around indirect land use change, and coded the data concerning values engaged in the debate and the definition, evaluation, classification and categorization of biofuels.

Findings suggest that the moral values engaged in the early debate on land use (food vs. fuel, food insecurity and loss of biodiversity) were re-appropriated and translated into a carbon accounting debate. They show how the “unobservable” and “impossible to measure” risk of ILUC was transformed into grams of CO₂per unit of energy through the deployment of ILUC modelling technologies in which the outputs of economic models were translated into biophysical models and into life cycle analysis. Findings also suggest that the re-design of evaluation methodologies to classify biofuels according to their carbon emissions was fed by an ongoing tension between the sustainability values of biofuels and the demonstration of sustainability. Ultimately, the purpose of carbon accounting was to send market signals regarding unsustainable biofuels.

This paper joins the debates on value plurality and value work in markets and on the translation of contentious moral values into standard material measures through evaluation technologies. It offers a novel empirical perspective to a burgeoning literature that has hitherto focused on carbon markets.