Seeing Like a Standard: EU, sustainable biofuels, and land use change in Africa

Biofuels have expanded across the globe, generating a range of concerns in the places of production. One approach to controlling the effects of biofuel production has been sustainability standards. This article takes a 'seeing like' approach to analyse how the EU Sustainability standard contributes to narrowing the vision of what sustainable biofuels are. Six biofuel cases in Africa are examined through the lens of the standard, using remote sensing to investigate the criteria on land use and canopy cover change. The standard view is also compared to on ground views regarding the sustainability of the projects. The effects of seeing like the EU standard are two: 1) diluted seeing, which prioritises global environmental problems over more nuanced social and institutional aspects; and 2) distributed seeing, which transforms standardised sustainable biofuels into multiple, uncertain forms because of hybrid governance. High carbon losses due to biofuel projects were detected, but at the same time, the standard simplifies and skips over wider problems related to unsustainable biofuel projects.