Although it is well known that large-scale bioenergy expansion erodes different environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable development, in countries like Brazil, bioenergy is institutionalized as a flagship climate strategy aimed to cut down  CO2 emissions in transport. These trade-offs have serious implications for climate change governance and sustainable development; however, conventional approaches have not yet properly explained this seeming paradox. This article addresses this gap from a critical development pathways approach to bioenergy as a maladaptive strategy in Brazil. I propose an analytical framework to observe how different ideas, interests, and institutions interplay in the historical institutionalization of bioenergy as a climate strategy. The analysis shows that bioenergy institutionalization has been driven by the endemic economic crisis in the sugar sector and governmental interests associated with security and developmental imperatives. The unsustainable co-evolution of development pathways and bioenergy, marked by deforestation, land colonization, and agricultural expansion, has narrowed the adaptation space in agriculture, gearing current climate policy towards path-dependent maladaptive strategies like bioenergy. Paradoxically, framing bioenergy as a climate strategy has been useful to justify more expansive policies in favor of the sugarcane industry, and to greenwash the Brazilian climate policy in the international arena of climate governance.

Private companies have in recent years started to disclose information about their exposure and responses to climate risks. However, we still know little about how and why private actors engage in climate change adaptation, and to what extent they do so in ways that improve societal resilience. This article addresses these questions. It conceptualizes private adaptation as consisting of institutional, infrastructural and community-oriented responses to climate risks. It develops a political-economic framework about the drivers of private adaptation, where private adaptation is expected to be shaped by pressures exerted by governments, investors, and civil society actors. Empirically, the framework is explored by using an original dataset on the adaptation responses of the 37 largest mining companies worldwide. We select the mining sector as mineral extraction plays a critical role in the low-carbon transition, and can, at the same time, exacerbate climate vulnerability in extracting sites. The descriptive findings suggest that the majority of the investigated companies have set up procedures to assess climate impacts on business operations, integrated climate risks in water governance, and adapted their infrastructure. The explanatory results indicate that private adaptation is mainly driven by investor pressures, and not domestic regulations and civil society. By implication, companies rarely engage in community-oriented adaptation responses by cooperating with local communities in ways that would benefit these communities. Taken together, our findings help to better understand the limitations of private adaptation and barriers to achieve transformative change, and identify how private adaptation could help improve societal resilience.

Background

Low-carbon technologies must be widely adopted at a large scale to address climate change and enhance access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy. The uptake of those technologies is often supported by specific policies developed at a national or regional level and those policies, like the technologies themselves, can diffuse from one place to another. This paper sheds some light on this ‘policy transfer’ and investigates the dynamics, the actors and the processes involved. We illustrate what happens when renewable energy support policies in one country inspire renewable support policies in another country using three case studies in Peru, Thailand and Uganda as examples.

Results

Using an adapted version of the policy transfer framework first elaborated by Dolowitz and Marsh (Polit Stud 44:343–57, 1996; Governance 13:5–23, 2000), we describe the policy transfer process in the three case study countries according to several criteria. We find that policy transfer is not a straightforward process where a ‘borrower’ country simply adopts policies from a ‘lender’ country, but instead a complex process where many actors - national and international – interact to shape the outcome of the process. And while experiences particularly in the EU as well as international developments have influenced the policy transfer in case study countries significantly, domestic issues also play a key role in shaping the transferred policies and in adapting them to local contexts. Moreover, the policy transfer process is not an one-off event, but a continuous process where iterative learning helps the policies to evolve over time.

Conclusions

Policy transfer is a complex matter, involving many stakeholders during a continuous process over time. The Dolowitz and Marsh framework proved useful to analyse policy transfer and the actors involved although questions for further research remain. For instance, against what kind of criteria should the ‘success’ of a policy transfer be measured? Moreover, while comparing three illustrative case studies is a first, useful step, having a larger set of case studies and data might enhance our understanding of the details of the processes involved even further.

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the notion of lenses: perspectives on value and valuation along diverse dimensions that describe what values focus on, how their sociality is envisioned, and what epistemic and procedural assumptions are made. We characterise fourteen of such dimensions. This provides a foundation for exploration of seven areas of tension, between: (1) the values of individuals vs collectives; (2) values as discrete and held vs embedded and constructed; (3) value as static or changeable; (4) valuation as descriptive vs normative and transformative; (5) social vs relational values; (6) different rationalities and their relation to value integration; (7) degrees of acknowledgment of the role of power in navigating value conflicts. In doing so, we embrace the ‘mess’ of diversity, yet also provide a framework to organise this mess and support and encourage active transdisciplinary collaboration. We identify key research areas where such collaborations can be harnessed for sustainability transformation. Here it is crucial to understand how certain social value lenses are privileged over others and build capacity in decision-making for understanding and drawing on multiple value, epistemic and procedural lenses.

The history of liquid bioenergy in Brazil is a meaningful source of information vis-à-vis the political economy dynamics that underlie low-carbon energy transitions. By studying the political economy of bioenergy under a historical long-run perspective, this research seeks to shed light on the interplay between governance and bioenergy transition. Understanding governance as the dynamic interface between private and public interests, in turn conditioned by the natural, institutional and technological context, we explore the sources of institutional and economic change regarding bioenergy development. Using an analytical framework designed to study bioenergy governance in the US, this inquiry addresses the Brazilian bioenergy transition. The analysis reveals that beyond the incremental learning process of institutional and industrial transformation, the historical patterns of bioenergy evolution result from the dynamics of governance between the agro-industry and the government, a historical process of convergence and conflict of opportunity costs regarding bioenergy penetration. Thus, by altering the expected gains of the key actors, contextual factors related to energy and agricultural markets affects the decision-making process at the private and public dimension of governance, determining by convergence or by conflict, the pace of institutional change, the development of markets and the historical transition of liquid bioenergy in Brazil.