Sustainability as public policy: the biodiesel in Brazil

Author(s)

Marilia d'Ottaviano Giesbrecht

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2013-10-29

Examining board members

Leila da Costa Ferreira; Roberto Pereira Guimarães; Carlos Alfredo Joly; Marcel Bursztyn; Dimas Floriani

• Advisor: Leila da Costa Ferreira

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the process of institutionalization and development of the National Biodiesel Production and Use Program (PNPB) in Brazil, launched in 2004 with the mission of organizing the biodiesel production chain for its introduction into the national energy matrix. In view of the broader discussion and controversy around the role of biofuels in mitigating the effects associated with global climate change, the creation of PNPB seems to affirm a favorable position of the Brazilian government regarding the use and production of liquid biofuel in this debate. At the same time, the development of the biodiesel program proved to be sensitive to structural issues in Brazilian society, as land problems and the difficulty of inserting a significant portion of small farmers in Agribusiness, suggesting the inclusion of this sector in the emerging biodiesel supply chain. One of the hypotheses proposed by this research is that the historical experience of the Alcohol Program, implemented in Brazil in 1975, singles out the current national debate about biofuels and therefore strongly influences the social, economic and environmental expectations deposited in the biodiesel program. The process of discussion, creation and institutionalization of PNPB also reveals a dynamic policy where there are clearly opposing viewpoints in understanding how the process of introduction of biodiesel in the national energy matrix must be given. There is a dilemma that divides both the government agencies (ministries, departments) involved in the Biodiesel Program, but also the actors directly related to the process, such as the manufacturers of biofuel, soybean farmers, family farmers: between making the biodiesel a viable fuel, technically and economically, or to make the biodiesel production and its productive chain an array of social inclusion. This divergence is found mainly in the discussion of the use of castor oil versus soy oil as biodiesel raw material and, in general, in the technical and scientifical dilemmas that supports and legitimizes it. Finally, the aim is to show, based in the PNPB case, how the definition of the notion of sustainability is, by and large, itself a disputed asset: it is always built and signified from the modes in which it is in fact practiced. Namely, the concept of sustainability is so diversified as are the political contexts in which it takes form, notwithstanding the innumerous theoretical conceptualizations that tend to crystalize it as subjected to a single definition (AU)