Will competition save the planet? Examining the workings of Green Competitiveness in the pursuit of emissions reduction

JUAN IGNACIO STARICCO; BURASCHI, MÓNICA

Córdoba

Taller; Gobernanza de la sustentabilidad en la bioeconomía; 2023

Instituto de Administración, UNC

Green competitiveness constitutes a form of “economization of environmental regulation” that promotes the development of institutional frameworks in which the logic of competition is bent towards the achievement of certain environmental goals. Consequently, the competitiveness of economic actors becomes directly dependent on their environmental performance. In order to empirically examine the workings of green competitiveness, we analyze the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive (EU-RED), as it is implemented in the biodiesel global value chain (GVC) between Argentina and the EU. The analysis is organized around three questions: how is the logic of green competitiveness embedded in EU-RED?; how does it affect the decisions made by actors?; what are its concrete environmental effects in the Argentinean biodiesel sector? Our findings show that EU-RED successfully institutionalizes the logic of green competitiveness, whose rationale is adopted by all actors in Argentina’s biodiesel sector. However, the strategies that they develop in order to foster their “green competitive advantage”, more often than not, end up being decoupled from any relevant environmental impacts. As a consequence, the empirical analysis of EU-RED’s implementation in the Argentina-EU biodiesel GVC shows the inherent limitations of this economizing approach to environmental regulation.