Indirect land-use change and biofuels: The contribution of assemblage theory to place-specific environmental governance

• European efforts to address ILUC have overlooked place-specific knowledge.
• Assemblage theory suggests ILUC can only be explained in its place-specific context.
• ILUC always results from a unique combination of local and non-local factors.
• ILUC research and policy should make use of both local and global representations.

The blending of liquid biofuels into road transport fuel has been supported by legally binding targets in Europe since 2009. Concerns over the extent to which these targets might engender indirect land-use change (ILUC), however, have an equally long history. Brought about when biofuel production displaces existing agricultural activity into new territory, ILUC has the potential to exert deleterious impacts upon the global climate, biodiversity, water and soil quality, food security, and even land rights. This paper begins by illustrating how current approaches to addressing this problem, predicated on equilibrium modelling and the concept of emissions ‘factors’, effectively detach its impacts from their place-specific contexts. Drawing on a relational view of space, the paper then advances an alternative, assemblage-based approach to conceptualising ILUC. By emphasising ILUC's fluidity, indeterminacy and complexity, this approach questions the logic of relying solely on abstractive science and policy tools to address the problem. The paper concludes by advocating an alternative approach to remedying ILUC – one that imbricates both place-specific and globally aggregated representations of the problem. The paper has implications for research across multiple disciplines addressing the sustainable governance of transport biofuels and wider bioenergy systems as a whole.