How do environmental NGOs participate in the construction of EU biofuel policy?

NGO presence is an important factor driving the policy discussion in the field of EU environmental policy, where key legislation on climate is on its way and expected up until 2030 in order to materialise the EU:s climate ambitions. Renewable energy is of the cornerstones of EU climate and energy policy in the transport sector, and the EU biofuel policy has been of topical concern for some time now. A large share of the renewable energy in the transport sector is still expected to come from biofuels, which have raised questions about the sustainability and climate benefits of EU biofuels policy. The sustainability issues of biofuel production are kept topical not least because of active pressure from media and NGOs. Internationally, in the aftermath of the worldwide food price rise of 2007-2008, environmental NGOs were successful in turning political pressure on the topic of biofuels and land grabbing. Similarly, in the EU, environmental NGOs are vocal in this policy field and pressure from them probably played an important role in pushing the European Commission to bring forward the legislative proposal of the ILUC Directive in 2012, which aimed at limiting the negative effects of EU biofuel production and to raise the climate benefits of EU biofuels - a case of high importance for the environmental NGOs. J.L. Austin’s speech act theory outlines that to say something in the right circumstances is not always merely saying or describing, but doing something. Austin’s theory of speech acts provides both the theoretical and methodological frameworks for this thesis, where the aim is to analyse how policy is constructed through language and how environmental NGOs participate in the construction of EU biofuel policy. Rather than asking about the reasonings or possibilities behind the NGOs intentions or possibilities to participate in the shaping of policy, the aim is to show that policy is constructed by certain norms through certain speech acts. The thesis analyses NGO utterances in a set of publications and compares these utterances to the final legislative act in order to see how successful the NGO speech acts were and to what extent they were directly or indirectly reflected in final legislation. The thesis finds that saying something in the right circumstances and in the right way is indeed not only saying or describing something, but doing something. Language and words are used to do things, and the NGOs analysed here are successful in participating in the construction of EU biofuel policy through the use of language and speech acts