Johan Hedrén

Critical notes on sustainability and democracy

The projects of sustainable development constitute a world basically created out of what has been labelled “essentially contested concepts”2: ecology, growth, development, basic needs, sustainability, justice, welfare and maybe the most tricky of them all — democracy. Despite this, in discourses on sustainable development most of these concepts are over and over again treated as if they were the most self-evident matters of course. Their ambiguity, complexity and obscurity are only sporadically commented on in this context. The reason for this seemingly strange fact is certainly strategic needs for rhetorical power, in order to reach co-operation, decisions and implementation in the complex “ecological areas”. To make anything substantial happen in the political realm of ecology, it is generally necessary to reduce the comprehensive complexity related to sustainability both in the social and in the ecological spheres. One prominent strategy to simplify these issues is to use the well-known classical narratives of modernity, applied to generally accepted ecological goals. In these narratives the above-mentioned concepts, all with a positive aura, are fundamental, but explorations of them in political discourses are rare.

Bioenergy as an Empty Signifier

The article provides insight into the contemporary international bioenergy debate and scrutinizes how the idea of biofuel production as a win-win-win solution to energy insecurity, climate change, and agricultural stagnation came into being, what discursive forces bind such a conceptualization, and where dislocations arise. Based on critical assumptions of discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, the analysis explores assessments, reports, policy papers, and other central documents from three influential international organizations—the International Energy Agency, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—that provide an entry point to the global debate on biofuels. We show that the bioenergy concept occupies specific positions and conveys different meanings within the three overlapping discourses of energy, climate, and agriculture. These three discursive areas are further “sutured” around the notion of biofuel production, where a hegemonic thread of the capitalist market economics, fixated on economic growth and presupposing the necessity of cost-effectiveness, results in internal contradictions and dislocations within the win-win-win conceptualization, emptying bioenergy of any content.