Who with Whom in Biofuel Policy? Coalitions in the Media Discourse on Liquid Biofuels in Germany

Abstract

Politically driven, Germany’s biofuel sector has developed extremely fast in the last two decades. This development was favoured by a very successful presence of the beneficiaries of that support policy ‐ namely, the biofuel industry, German farmers and the agribusiness ‐ in the media.Amongst renewable energies, the use of biomass for fuel production is certainly one of the most controversially discussed forms. Although biofuels have been criticized for years, the EU and its member states persistently support this alternative fuel. The politically-driven development of biofuels has, especially in Germany, grown very fast in the years 1995 to 2012. This study is interested in the discursive environment that contributed to this growth. By applying a media discourse analysis, we investigated the perception of biofuels, discourse coaltions, and why some actors managed to dominate the public debate on biofuels.As our results show, biofuel supporters were most successful as <list list-type="order"> <list-item>they found several advocates across different policy areas,</list-item> <list-item>made use of the most significant frame within the debate, and</list-item> <list-item>used a variety of arguments in a broad, but still incorporated set of frames.</list-item> </list>