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How good enough biofuel governance can help rural livelihoods: making sure that biofuel development works for small farmers and communities |
Feb 2008
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The implementation of biofuel schemes can be compared to battles given the diversity and uncertainties of landscape conditions, and of the various and often diverging interests at play. In such contexts, power plays an important role in decision-making. Therefore it is important to ensure that biofuel development at least does not harm and, preferably, favours the livelihood strategies of small-scale producers and communities in rural areas.
This paper addresses this issue by focusing on what it takes to achieve “biofuel for sustainable rural livelihoods”. The crux of the matter to achieve this lies in ’good enough’ governance mechanisms at the interface between sustainable biofuel development (SBD) and sustainable livelihoods of rural people.
This paper discusses these around three main aspects of biofuel development, i.e.
- Sustainability: what it means and how to achieve it at local level;
- Contractual arrangements between biofuel companies and small-scale farmers, and
- Decentralised/community-type biofuel schemes.
The successful implementation of these aspects requires some common ingredients, i.e.
- They are closely linked to smallholders and communities’ livelihoods;
- They involve many stakeholders, from different arenas, with different interest and power, and at different levels;
As a result of the above,
- adequate stakeholder participation in multistakeholder processes is a key ingredient for their success;
- Market forces play an important role in their implementation, but there are also no doubts that non-market mechanisms are a necessary complement to correct market failures;
- Linked to the above, their successful implementation requires a mixture of regulations and voluntary instruments;
- They often have an iterative character in that their implementation often requires some dose of action-learning;
- Given their (potentially) participatory and iterative character, they are often able to highlight critical gaps in policy and institutional processes;
- As in the case of any new instrument, where they have an innovative character, their major implementation constraints have to do with policy and institutional weaknesses, such as missing policies or regulations, insecure stakeholders’ rights over the resource at stake, unclear and/or anachronistic institutional arrangements, conflicting policy signals lack of information or misinformation, and weak implementation capacities.
These common characteristics of successful biofuel development mean that the policies and institutions related to SBD have to include a wide range of elements, and their implementation will require a multi-stakeholder learning process. The paper proposes the innovative idea of an illustrative ‘pyramid’ of governance elements necessary to achieve o SBD.
By: O. Dubois (FAO)
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