Keeping things different: coexistence within European markets for cleantech and biofuels

Environmental policy increasingly resorts to market-based instruments in order to meet sustainability objectives. The ‘carbon market’ instituted by the European Emissions Trading directive from 2003 is a canonical example, which has been described, and critiqued, as a delegation of policy objectives to market exchanges. In this paper, we examine the complex ways in which the operationalization of policy objectives and the organization of markets are intertwined, focusing on two other examples of European environmental regulation. The first one is the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive from 1996, which defined the ‘best available techniques’ to curb emissions in air, water and soil. The second one is the Renewable Energy Directive from 2009, which introduced criteria for the definition of the sustainability of biofuels. Through the analysis of the design and implementation of these two directives, we identify a central concern for the coexistence of various objects, and various initiatives undertaken by European institutions, member states and private actors. We use the notion of coexistence to describe a European political and economic ordering that is inherently hybrid, and cannot be reduced to a mere delegation of policy objectives to the market, or a legal constraint imposed on all European actors. It grounds its political legitimacy and economic rationality on the distribution of roles and responsibilities across public and private actors, and on the ability to ‘keep things different’ according to local variabilities.