The macro-environment for liquid Biofuels in Brazilian science and public policies

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the macro-environmental dimensions through which Brazilian scientists and government officials have framed issues surrounding liquid biofuels over a period of time. This study analyzes scientific papers published by researchers affiliated with Brazilian institutions and official documents of the Brazilian government related to liquid biofuels. Documents published during a ten-year period (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006) were collected from electronic sources. Text-mining procedures were applied through a framework of macro-environmental dimensions and their corresponding d-words in order to extract high-quality content. Results indicate that the macro-environment developed by Brazilian scientists differs from the one created by the government. Variations in describing macro-environmental dimensions existed for both the Brazilian government and for scientists during the period of analysis. Similarity tests reveal significant differences between the scientific documents and the government documents, indicating that Brazilian public policy regarding liquid biofuels is dissociated from the scientific findings of Brazilian researchers.

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“…In another application, Rabini et al (2020) develop a coding scheme for leadership trait analysis in the German language to examine the influence of leadership on German foreign policy using computational text analysis. Text analysis has also been used to study issue framing-such as in the case of biofuel policy in Brazil (Talamini & Dewes, 2012)-as well as its influence on public attitude, for example, in the case of austere fiscal policy in Britain (Barnes & Hicks, 2018). In addition, scholars have employed text analysis techniques to investigate the interplay between the public and the media, illustratively, in response to mass shootings (Croitoru et al, 2020) or the presidential election (Alashri et al, 2016) in the United States.…”

Modelling the Coevolution of the Fuel Ethanol Industry, Technology System, and Market System in China: A History-Friendly Model

“…The scientific community is concerned about environmental protection and technology, while the government is concerned more about geopolitics. This difference reveals that either the scientific community needs to pay more attention to the knowledge demands of policymakers or that policymakers need to focus more on scientific and technological knowledge [10].…”

“…These factors mainly include technology change [7][8][9][10], market demand [11][12][13], feedstocks [8,14,15], renewable energy infrastructures [16,17], energy policies [18][19][20][21], and economic, social, and environmental impacts [22][23][24][25]. These works mainly used case studies [8,10], econometric methods [9,11,12,19], and simulation methods [7,13]. Although the existing literature provides important information on the relationships between the fuel ethanol industry growth and its drivers, there are still some limitations.…”