Fuelling friendships or driving divergence? Legitimacy, coherence, and negotiation in Brazilian perceptions of European and American biofuels governance

Abstract

Traditional global powers like the European Union and the United States are seeing the rise of emerging powers like Brazil as prospective cooperation partners. Examining how traditional powers are perceived by their emerging counterparts offers critical insights into the prerequisites for effective and durable partnerships. While the literature on external perceptions has expanded considerably, a comparative perspective on how emerging powers perceive the policies of the two transatlantic powers in issue-specific areas is lacking. We present a framework of explanatory variables (legitimacy, coherence and negotiating style) and apply it to interview data and the literature to unravel Brazil's relations on biofuels with the EU and US, including through trilateral partnerships with third countries. Our data show that while Brazil's partnership with the US has progressed, the one with the EU has struggled to advance. Our paper seeks to explain these differences using our framework, advance understanding on the external perceptions of the international role and collaborative posture of the EU and US, and provide policy insights for the fruitful conduct of partnerships.

International Bioeconomy Governance: Unveiling the Initial Patterns

“…This alliance of sorts became institutionalized through a memorandum of understanding between the two countries signed in 2007, followed in 2011 by a presidential-level Strategic Energy Dialogue with biofuels as a priority area (Wright 2008;Seelke and Meyer 2009; The White House 2012). Despite tariffs that either country may put in place to control bilateral ethanol trade, globally they remain very much aligned on biofuels, and cooperation continues despite the changes of administration in both countries (Afionis and Stringer 2020).…”

“…Instead, those standards are unilaterally elaborated and embraced a priori, then imposed as a conditionality for development cooperation or import of feedstock and biofuels. Brazil has been a vocal opponent of such unilateral rule-making (see Afionis and Stringer 2020), while other emerging countries have generally critiqued the EU for often "talking at" rather than "talking with" its overseas partners in governance matters (Chaban et al 2017).…”