The Production of Scientific Evidence on Indirect Land Use Change and its Role in EU Biofuels Politics
Indirect land use change (ILUC) became one of the most heatedly debated issues in EU’s biofuels policy in recent years, which is underpinned by the wide range of scientific evidence on the topic. In this paper, we give a detailed overview of the research on biofuels’ ILUC. The analysis shows how the increase in ILUC research and its characteristics can be related to the societal problems arising from biofuels production and to the actors involved in it. This points to the social embeddedness of ILUC research into societal and political practices. In this respect, our observations suggest that the role of scientific evidence on ILUC has eventually been reduced to an instrumental one, serving to legitimize and rationalize decisions agreed upon elsewhere beforehand.
