Looking beyond calculative spaces of biofuels: Onto-topologies of indirect land use changes

Geoforum 50 (2013) 182–190

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Looking beyond calculative spaces of biofuels: Onto-topologies of indirect land use changes Niko Heikki Humalisto ⇑, Mikko Joronen University of Turku, Department of Geography and Geology, Section Geography, Vesilinnantie 4, 20014 Turku, Finland

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Received 15 February 2013 Received in revised form 30 August 2013 Available online 3 October 2013 Keywords: Biofuels Indirect land use changes iLUC policies Ontology Topology

a b s t r a c t By dedicating food to fuel, recent biofuel policy developments in the European Union have become part of the substantial substitution of existing land use patterns around the globe. This process has had various environmental and social consequences, commonly discussed under the topic of ‘indirect land use changes’ (iLUC). Although the European Commission has strived to mitigate the indirect biofuel related land use impacts, in this paper we show that the recent directive proposal on iLUC is rather a quick fix than a delicate attempt to grasp the topological and ontological polymorphism of the phenomenon. We will demonstrate this, firstly, by showing how the iLUC policy development of the Commission has been intertwined with the iLUC models that have quantified the indirect GHG impacts of various biofuel feedstocks. Secondly, we will examine how these calculative models have created a problematic ontological framing of the iLUC by concealing the manifold spatialities of this elusive phenomenon. Finally, the calculative models have not only posited iLUC into calculative nexuses of ordering; such calculations have also remained unable to explicate the heterogeneous topologies of actual biofuel production. We illustrate this crucial point by explicating three types of topological mediation – the fluid, the parasite and the fire – that cannot be acknowledged with the iLUC models or contemporary policies of European Union. In sum, by combining and rethinking the ideas of Heidegger, Latour and Serres, we argue for an onto-topological approach capable of taking into account manifold and complex topologies and ontologies of biofuel production. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction As a renewable energy source, which does not necessarily require major changes in the existing motor vehicle technologies or fuel distribution infrastructure, biofuels have raised high hopes of traffic de-carbonization, particularly in the European Union (EU). The EU now requires its Member States to reach a 10% share of renewable fuels in road transport by 2020 (EC, 2009a). During the last decade or so, we have witnessed a rapid growth in the EU’s crop-based biodiesel and ethanol consumption. As has been argued, this has not happened without impacts on agricultural production (OECD/FAO, 2012). The re-allocation of crops to fuel has caused, almost without exception, changes in existing land use practices, thus catalysing a substantial amount of dispersed indirect land use changes (iLUC) (IPCC, 2011: chapter 2; Laborde, 2011). In short, iLUC occur through various mediators that range from a displaced community of subsistence farmers to changes in the world agricultural commodity prices, which are connected with direct land use changes, such as the conversions of forests and pastures ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: nihehu@utu.fi (N.H. Humalisto), mikko.joronen@utu.fi (M. Joronen). 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.09.013

into plantations that yield biofuel feedstocks. The European Commission has been compelled to find suitable methodologies for assessing the iLUC question and, if necessary, to design policies that can properly mitigate these negative consequences of biofuel development. Several attempts to model the scope of the iLUC have been undertaken; unfortunately, indirect land use changes remain quite elusive in nature, as their occurrence can have considerable temporal and spatial distance to those direct land use changes (dLUC), which have catalysed them in the first place (see Andrade de Sa et al., 2013). Whatever their success has been, it is clear that the models have had remarkable influence on the way in which iLUC has been discussed and framed in the European Union’s policy making (Di Lucia et al., 2012; Levidow, 2013; Palmer, 2012). In this paper, we focus on scrutinizing the calculative framing of the iLUC-question in the European Commission’s biofuel policies. Even though geographical work on the subject is still relatively scarce (Bridge, 2010: 824–825), recently a growing interest in manifold geographies and political ecologies around crop-based biofuels has emerged. Attention, however, has been mainly centred on topics such as food security (Hought et al., 2012), deforestation (Gao et al., 2011), migrant workers (McGrath, 2013), the promotion of green capitalism (Prudham, 2009), and the influence of local mapmaking on biofuel politics (Neville and Dauvergne, 2012). Even

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though there has been some interest in the sustainability of the EU’s biofuel policies (Levidow, 2013), or alternatively, in the scope of the political possibilities in climate change responses (Wainwright and Mann, 2013) or the calculative ontologies behind the politics of carbon economy (Lansing, 2010), we argue that a joint reading of space, politics and ontology allows us a more profound view of the problems behind the contemporary calculative politics of the EU’s biofuel policies. Our aim here is twofold: to discuss the relation between EU policies and iLUC models, and to explore what we call ‘onto-topological’ implications of this relation. In this respect, our first aim is to show how the treatment of indirect land use impacts in the EU’s biofuel policies has been based on a narrow politics of what we call by following Martin Heidegger the calculative ‘enframing’ (das Gestell). In particular, we will show how this is due to the use of different quantitative models as a basic signpost for approaching the iLUC question. Secondly, we will explain how such calculative ‘enframing’ has created topological insufficiencies to the EU’s biofuel policies. We, of course, do acknowledge the positive impact the agroeconomic models have had on the process of making the iLUC phenomenon solid enough to become tackled with the policy instruments of the EU. In what follows, we will nevertheless show how the problem with the biofuel policies is not so much of the reliability of the epistemic representations these models produce, but of the way the models ontologically purify the actual place-based land use changes by implementing spatially indifferent nexuses of calculative measurement upon the iLUC. In order to make a case for this thesis, we will further explicate why and how the ontological politics of calculative ‘enframing’ has remained incapable of taking into account the unpredictable topologies of biofuel production. We will do this, by discussing the iLUC question against the topological and ontological insights originating more or less in the works of Latour (1987, 1993, 2005), Serres (1982, 2007) and Heidegger (2003; see also Ryan, 2011; Malpas, 2012). By ‘topology’, we hence refer to the heterogeneous place-based ‘assemblages’ or ‘gatherings’ of biofuel production, which are constituted out of the multiple unpredictable connections (and potentialities) between human and non-human actors, ‘enframing’, in turn, denoting a set-up that ontologically aims to frame the way these gatherings come-to-presence as placeless reserves of calculative ordering. We will depict how iLUC models, owing to their calculative ontology, do not (and cannot) take into account the way biofuel production is fundamentally constituted through the active spatial connections created by the vital and active effects of material things and human action. All in all, our aim is not to analyse onto-topologies of singular biofuel production sites, or to continue discussions concerning the finding of the most suitable model to quantify iLUC in terms of GHG emissions, but rather to grasp those topological and incalculable forms of indirect land use relations that the calculative ethos behind Commission’s policies is unable to attend to. We will proceed in three stages. The first part of the paper starts by presenting those key EU policy features that have had a central role in catalysing indirect land use changes. We shortly trace the Commission’s policy-development concerning the iLUC until the recent directive proposal (CEC, 2012a) and demonstrate how iLUC models have had a profound impact on this legislation. Our overall purpose in the first part is to show how the Commission’s separation of biofuels and food crops is an important policy decision that leans on the knowledge produced by the iLUC models. We start the second part of the paper by scrutinizing those calculative frameworks that the Commission used to define, govern and unfold the indirect land use changes (iLUC) of biofuel production. We aim at a more fundamental exploration of biofuel politics, which operates already at the level of ontology – i.e., through the ontological ‘enframing’ of iLUC phenomenon. By this, we do not wish to under-

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mine the power of the Commission’s policy making. Our aim is rather to explore the limits of the ontological horizon, which the calculative modelling and framing of the iLUC phenomenon has enclosed. Accordingly, in as much as the ontological scaffolding of ‘enframing’ constitutes a horizon of possibility for the policy decisions, it purifies the diversity of indirect land use impacts into a quantifiable realm of existence. By building upon the ontological approach more or less set by Martin Heidegger, we scrutinize the relation that the ontological politics of carbon governance has with the indirect land use impacts of the EU’s biofuel consumption. In the third part of the paper, we conclude by examining how these calculations are intrinsically unable to tackle the forms of relatedness, unpredictable connections, vital materialities and indirect effects, which we see as constitutive for the actual topological formations of biofuel production. Accordingly, we understand both human and non-human entities as active and capable of creating and catalysing effects. We argue that the topological insensitivity of the EU biofuel policies does not come from the lack of proper calculations, but from the constricted ontological relation to things, which the calculative models, and the policies based on them, constitute. By questioning the linear and causal understanding of the relationship between biofuel policies and their (direct and indirect) land use impacts, the paper ends by proposing a non-calculative and topology-sensitive approach capable of scrutinizing the complex onto-topologies of biofuel production.

2. Designing the governance of iLUC in the European Union’s biofuel policy framework We begin this section by identifying three processes that have increased the potentiality for iLUC impacts to occur as a result of the rapid biofuel development of the EU prior to scrutinizing the interrelations of the iLUC policy making and the modelling. First, since the EU set its policies to support the commercialization of biofuels, the growth rates have been staggering. In 2001, biofuel consumption was around 930,000 tons of oil equivalent (toe) and a decade later already 13,600,000 toe, showing growth of 1460% (Systemes Solaires, 2004, 2012). Indeed, it can be argued that the first priority of the Commission was to create political and economic surroundings for the fast biofuel development. However, the incentivizing biofuel policies implemented in the EU were rather poorly equipped to steer biofuel development away from the direct and indirect ecological, social, and climatic problems that began to emerge due to the actual consequences of the fast growth in consumption (see UCS, 2012). Secondly, the majority of the negative consequences of biofuels are related to the first generation fuels. These are crop-based and therefore more land demanding. In comparison, advanced biofuels that are refined from wastes, residues or algae (often referred as the second and third generation of biofuels) have smaller land use impacts. However, their speed of commercialization has been slower than expected, which is one of the reasons EU Member States planned their biofuel consumption for the coming decade on the increasing utilization of crop-based biofuels (Beurskens et al., 2011). Thirdly, at the moment already 65% of EU rape oil production is refined into biodiesel although the total share of biofuels in road transport remains still below 5% (OECD/FAO, 2012: 88). As ICCT (2013: 6) indicates, EU imports of palm oil that mostly originates from South East Asia have grown substantially in relation to the increasing biodiesel consumption of the EU – although the palm oil is not refined into diesel but used in other sectors, such as food industry. Nonetheless, due to the limited capacity of domestic agricultural feedstock in fossil fuels replacement, also the share of imported biofuels has grown rapidly in the EU: in 2012, the share of imported ethanol was 15% and 30% for biodiesel (see Systemes Sol-

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aires, 2013: 57). What is more, tens of millions hectares of land has now been sold, leased or rented to multinational companies producing biofuel feedstocks for the growing needs of the EU (Anseeuw et al., 2012; FAO, 2012). Together these developments have expanded biofuels’ direct and indirect land use impacts beyond the borders of the EU. Although the origin of the EU’s incentivizing biofuel policies dates back to the early 1990s (CEC, 1992a), the current iLUC debate is rooted in the Renewable Energy (RED) and Food Quality (FQD) directives (EC, 2009a, 2009b). While the RED set a 10% target for the share of renewable energy in transport, the FQD introduced a 6% GHG emission reduction target to encourage the de-carbonization of the road transport of the EU. According to the EU, its Member States should reach both of these targets by the end of the year 2020. The directives further introduced the biofuel sustainability criteria that are according in Commission’s opinion ‘‘the most comprehensive and advanced binding sustainability scheme of its kind anywhere in the world’’ (CEC, 2010a: 8). The sustainability criteria set a minimum threshold for GHG emission savings that the biofuels consumed in the EU have to adhere in comparison to fossil fuels. The criteria introduced default GHG emission values that can be used to verify the sustainability of a particular biofuel. However, instead of using passive default values, biofuel distributors and manufacturers can use the emission quantification schema that approaches the question of land use change impacts by measuring the annual GHG emission impact from the carbon stock changes. This requires a use of quantitative variables such as the ‘carbon stock per unit area’ associated with the ‘reference land use’ and the ‘actual land use’, additional values including variables such as ‘emission saving from soil carbon accumulation via improved agricultural management’, and ‘amount of emissions from the extraction or cultivation of raw materials’ (see EC, 2009a, Annex V, C). Accordingly, the directives presented a globally applicable method of quantifying the GHG emissions of any type of feedstock used in biofuel production. A more fatal shortfall with the sustainability scheme, however, was acted upon only afterwards: its limitation to direct land use changes (dLUC) alone. Accordingly, the European Parliament mandated the Commission to develop suitable policy methods for assessing and alleviating iLUC. In 2009, the Commission opened up a preparatory consultation and the actual consultation followed in 2010 with a purpose to seek ‘‘. . .advice on both the scale and characteristics of the problem, as well as, if the scale of the problem is significant enough, how it should be addressed’’ (DG Energy, 2010). The solution was to be established on ‘‘the best available science’’ (EC, 2009b, 22). As the Commission hold that ‘‘modelling is necessary to estimate indirect land-use change’’ (CEC, 2010b: 6), the consultation was thus accompanied with agro-economic equilibrium models prepared by independent research institutions. These models were used to quantify feedstock specific GHG emission estimates for different types of biofuels. As Palmer (2012: 505–506) argues, the Commission needed these models in order to set iLUC commensurable with the risk assessment metrics used in Commission’s regulative biofuel frameworks (see also Levidow, 2013). The iLUC consultation was steered towards the quantified crop- or region-based iLUC factors (that can only be acquired through models) as the Commission raised them to a prominent position among the possible policy instruments that could mitigate iLUC. The consultation, especially the credibility of models to function as a basis for the policy development, raised a heated debate among the Member States of the EU, biofuel refiners, NGOs, research institutions and other actors connected with the EU’s biofuel development. NGOs and scientists kept the models high on their agendas, while biofuel industry showed scepticism regards establishing policy development on iLUC models (compare Diester Industries, 2010; UCS, 2012). The iLUC question also received

mixed opinions within the Commission, most notably between the Directorates General Energy and Climate Action (Keating, 2010). However, in the process of iLUC policy making the models gained such a prominent position that it was not credible to take part in the iLUC discussions without proper knowledge concerning the models (see Palmer, 2012: 506). After a considerable delay, the Commission gave its final directive proposal in 17 October 2012. The feedstock specific iLUC factors for cereals and other starch rich crops, sugars and oil crops were introduced – however, not as mandatory but for reporting purposes only. The prime instrument of iLUC mitigation is a cap that limits the share of crop-based biofuels eligible for subsidies to 5% of all traffic fuels consumed in the EU by 2020. The rest of the RED’s 10% renewable fuel target should be reached in Member States by increasing the consumption of advanced biofuels and other renewable propulsion alternatives in transport. In the pursuit of disconnecting the EU’s biofuel development from its agricultural roots, the Commission went further by indicating that crop-based biofuels are not eligible for any subsidies after 2020 (CEC, 2012a). Even though we fully acknowledge that iLUC models did not straightforwardly determine the outcome of the Commission’s directive proposal, we wish to turn the following discussion to the interconnectedness between the models and the implementation of suitable iLUC mitigation instruments in the EU. As we have demonstrated, the models had a crucial role, not only in assessing the existence and scope of iLUC, but also on how iLUC was characterized and brought into the sphere of the Commission’s policy making. Although the directive proposal may appear to be more of a solution to the food vs. fuel debate, the links between the directive proposal and the models are also presented in the directive itself: ‘‘Scientific work indicates that emissions from indirect land-use change can vary substantially between feedstocks and can negate some or all of the greenhouse gas savings of individual biofuels relative to the fossil fuels they replace’’ and further that ‘‘Indirect land-use change emissions estimates are calculated through modelling’’ (CEC, 2012a: 2). Moreover, the representatives of the Commission such as the Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard has stated that ‘‘Science back then (while designing the sustainability criteria) was not sound enough [. . .] Today, we have the answer, yes there is such a thing as iLUC. If you factor iLUC in, climate wise some of the biofuels are as bad, or even worse, than the fossil fuels that they replace ’’ (CEC, 2012b, clarification added by the authors). Therefore, we feel obliged to continue the discussion opened by Palmer (2012) and Levidow (2013) concerning the interconnectedness of regulative policy making and the quantification of carbon via examining how models have purified the topological complexity of iLUC into the certainty of the calculative frameworks of governance.

3. Ontological politics of calculation and iLUC In order to exemplify assumptions behind the iLUC models, and thus the conditions of knowledge they generated for policy makers, we will now turn to discuss some of the key features of iLUC modelling. We will start with two key conditions behind the onto-topological inadequacies of iLUC models – the calculative linearity (from selected political and economic scenarios to the certain GHG emission values) and the reduced sense of agency in iLUC estimations – and further argue that these inadequacies are based on the two ontological conditions: on the denial of the inexhaustible possibility behind the self-emerging materiality of the real (which we refer to as the ‘earth’), and on the oblivion of the multiplicity of spatial assemblages between things and actors (whose combination we call the ’topology’). As will be explained in the last two parts of the paper, in order to properly grasp these ‘onto-topol-

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ogies’ of indirect land use changes, acknowledgement of the multiple geographical forms and active modes of self-presencing earth is required. The Commission’s iLUC consultation was accompanied with different partial and general agro-economic equilibrium models that quantified the iLUC impact of biofuel development in the terms of GHG emission values. The basic principles of studying iLUC through economic modelling were set by Searchinger et al. (2008) in their research concerning the indirect impacts of the corn ethanol in the US, even though later on the research has been argued to contain various weaknesses, the original estimates of iLUC, in particular, being too high (see Hertel et al., 2010: 223–224 for instance). Firstly, these models presuppose that iLUC is a marketmediated impact: the models begin by creating a baseline scenario for political and agricultural development, which is then shocked by a change in biofuel policy or the consumption of biofuels (see Edwards et al., 2010: 15). In order to measure such shocks, particularly the size and location of the iLUC, the models use quantitative parameters, such as price elasticity, the utilization of side-products, and yield responses. The devil, however, is in the detail. Not all of the parameters used in the models are empirically validated (see Birur et al., 2008; Laborde, 2011: 15), and consequently researchers have applied different values, which has caused considerable variations to the results (see Di Lucia et al., 2012). The produced estimations concerning the size and location of the iLUC are finally studied in relation with biophysical databases, such as the Agro-ecological Zones, in order to quantify GHG emissions related to land use changes (Birur et al., 2008: 14). Therefore, it is important to stress that the models provide knowledge concerning iLUC only under postulated scenarios instead of scrutinizing how iLUC is actually occurring – or how it could be in each case best counteracted. Secondly, iLUC models have challenges related to their dependency on historical land use patterns (IPCC, 2011: chapter 3), their postulation of linear relationships between factors that are known to be non-linear (Edwards et al., 2010: 27–28), and for their lack of sufficient and precise results caused by the growing multiplicity of geographical variances (Fast et al., 2012). Depending on the type of agro-economic model, modelling also loses institutional and spatial detail or treats changes in other sectors than agriculture externally (Prins et al., 2010: 5). The latter problem was satirically noted during the iLUC consultation by the Seed Processors and Oil Crushers Association: ‘‘It is something of a paradox to justify legislating on the issue of iLUC on the basis of studies that generally assume that legislation has little or no impact on land-use and the subsequent greenhouse gas emissions’’ (SPOCA, 2010). This argument illustrates an inherit weakness of the models to recognize the possibilities of counteracting iLUC, as they are not sensitive to new initiatives of land use planning or policies such as the strengthening of the areas of forest protection. Subsequently, the horizon of possible policy instruments for the mitigation of the iLUC became substantially narrowed. Although debates on finding the most suitable model for the assessment of iLUC impacts (Bauen et al., 2010; Overmars et al., 2011), and the best method for their empirical verification (see Andrade de Sa et al., 2013; Dale and Kim, 2011), are likely to continue, we suggest that the sustainability problem with indirect land use changes is not so much the appropriate selection or inaccuracy of the models as it is the ontological framing, which the models constitute by purifying the complexity of iLUC through the quantifiable realm of existence. Such purification, which we, by following the work of Martin Heidegger, refer to as the ‘enframing’ (das Gestell), denotes a specific mode of revealing that constitutes the phenomenological politics of iLUC impacts at the level of ontology (Heidegger, 1977, 2001b; see also Latour, 1993). By this, we want to acknowledge the ontological scaffolding the Commis-

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sion adopted when defining the impacts and sustainability of biofuel production, without proper acknowledgement of the topological and relational nature of indirect land use changes. Accordingly, with ‘topology’ we refer to the heterogeneous placebased assemblages of biofuel production, the relational aspect emphasizing the constitution of these assemblages out of the multiple connections between human and non-human things – something that contemporary iLUC models cannot take into account. As Hertel et al. (2010: 230) pinpoint, there is a strong need to open up the iLUC question for the scientific traditions, which do not solely depend on the insights of economic calculations and deterministic models. As mentioned above, problems related to this approach of the European Commission are not primarily concerned with the appropriate (or inappropriate) use of the models but the calculative ‘enframing’ adopted with the use of the models as a basis for political decision making. The models, we argue, create a peculiar ontological relation to things: they reduce the emergence of things solely to controllable, measurable and available stock extracted from the unpredictable eventuality and topological heterogeneity of life itself. Accordingly, biofuel related entities, particularly carbon, but also changes related to biodiversity and water, are ripped away from their own modes of vital emergence and fields of complex relations, thus being forced into reserves accessible for the exhaustive calculations. Heidegger calls such accessible stock, in which things are enframed and made amenable to the power to calculate, measure, and order them with maximum predictable certainty, as ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand) (Heidegger, 1977; see Demeritt, 2001; Joronen, 2008). As standing-reserves, things are not mere objects taken under full control; rather, their existence, their ontological mode of coming-to-presence, is enframed and reduced in advance to the reserve set available for the orders of modelling calculations. It is crucial to take into account that as a modality of revealing things, ‘enframing’ (Gestell) is not based on a success (or failure) of the used models, but on a peculiar ontological way of coming to presence. Enframing aims to purify the ‘presencing’ of things, their ontological multiplicity, in advance by reducing their presence into a set-up available for calculative manoeuvring and possession. This calculative ordering-revealing of things does not signify a full capture of things and their relations through the models – the logic of calculative enframing is only structured to function this way. Accordingly, ‘enframing’ denotes a measurement of revealing, the way things come to presence, not as an achievement of the complete ordering of things but as a drive to do so. The ‘enframing’ is not only ordering-revealing, but also a challenging-revealing – a revealing that challenges things in order to predict and measure their movements with best possible certainty. Although it is important to stress that the results of iLUC models are not random – the accountability of the models can also be questioned through empirical research, as Wicke et al. (2012: 91) argue – this mission itself is precisely the innermost limit of modelling. Instead of acknowledging the unpredictable and random events of revealing, the models are structured to gain tighter control and ordering of things with the variables that do not concern the messiness and uncontrollability of the becoming of actual relations, but their explanation, prediction and mastering through calculative and abstract approximations. Such calculative challenging – a drive towards a greater improvement of ordering – is always measured with regard to its own success: it neglects those local and particular anomalies that escape the grip of its enframing, at its best dealing them as not-yet-ordered circumstances in need of more efficient computing. Fundamentally ‘enframing’, and its calculative operations, do not refer to numbers and counting, but to the quality of revealing, which unfolds things by manipulating them into a setting where they can be ordered, controlled and challenged with calculative plans, scenarios and models.

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In the Gestell things are not only undifferentiated in ontological terms but also spatially. As ‘enframed’ things are moved apart from their originary sites of revealing, dis-placed into spatially indifferent and universally measurable relations, eventually being turned into mere nodes and variables subordinate to the distanceless nexuses of calculative ordering (Joronen, 2012, see also Elden, 2006). Accordingly, the iLUC impact is solely measured with regard to the calculative schemes set beforehand, such ‘enframing’ reducing the complex and unpredictably invasive land use changes into universal, topologically uncomprehending ontological frameworks. In order to secure the ecological sustainability of biofuel feedstock, the abstractions of the calculative models are structured to force the impacts of biofuel production from their surroundings and connections to the realm of calculative handling. All in all, Gestell is able to ‘enframe’ things into ‘standing-reserves’ by veiling two elements intrinsic to the emergence of biofuel production: the actual multiplicity of topological connections between things and human actors and the inexhaustible possibility behind the unpredictable self-emerge of material entities. In what follows, we will further concentrate on these two elements; firstly, on the denial of the self-emerging materiality, which we refer to, after Heidegger, as the ‘earth’, and secondly, on the obliteration of the complex geographies of the actualized topological relations. While the notion of earth refers to the ontological nature of iLUC calculations as a something which frame the potentiality for the unpredictable emergence of things, the latter refers to a lack of understanding concerning the actual topological outcomes these iLUC models pose. Since we will start by discussing how the calculative rationale of the models operates by enframing the potential emergence of biofuel related entities, we need to focus for a minute on the general question concerning the inner logic of Gestell, and further, on how it leads to the dismissal not only of the active occurrence of material entities, but of the topological nature of the actual biofuel assemblages. After all, it is by enframing the potentiality that the models end up in oblivion of actuality. First of all, it is crucial to notice that Heidegger does not define the earth through the paradigms of modern mathematical physics or natural sciences but in terms of concealment. By concealment he refers to the central feature constitutive for the materiality of the earth: the earth always flees the effort to fully capture and measure it, thus concealing its inner nature as an inexhaustible source of emergence. What thus remains concealed, escaping the power of calculative mastering, is the vital materiality of the earth, its own active and unpredictable emergence (Heidegger, 2001a; Joronen, 2012; Rose, 2012). Calculative attempts to model iLUC impacts cannot capture such active and unpredictable process of emergence: the earth flees all efforts of complete representation and measurement, leading eventually to the manifold and unpredictable gatherings of entities. Unexpected ruptures in the functioning of forest ecosystems affected by plantations, or sudden changes in global agricultural trade due to climatic disruptions, are examples par excellence of the potential events that are concealed from iLUC models, but which nevertheless, could have tremendous influence on the way iLUC actualize. It is due to its inner drive to order and measure that the calculative modelling cannot capture what remains concealed, and escapes all acts of measurements: the earth, which the production of biofuel feedstock is fundamentally grounded on. The calculative ‘enframing’ of biofuel assemblages is simply stuck with what Heidegger calls the ‘strife’ between the revealing (which our way of being-in-the-world brings forth) and the concealment (which the earth, in turn, signifies) (see Heidegger, 2001b). With the notion of ‘strife’, we want to bring forth a central feature constitutive for the phenomenological politics behind the calculative enframing of biofuel assemblages: the ontological play of concealing-revealing. We understand biofuel assemblages, as they

are constituted through the interactive relation between the revealing and the concealment, between particular ways of world-revealing and the sites of concealing earth these ways aim to reveal. In other words, while different modalities of being-inthe-world aim to define the materiality of the earth through the particular measurements of revealing they denote, at the same time the earth comes forth by disturbing the revealing through the matrix of vital becoming and self-emergence it, in turn, denotes. The strife thus creates an ambiguous relation. On the one hand, it is the earth that makes possible the revealing of things (i.e. it is the materiality of things that is given for worldly measures to disclose). On the other hand, it is also peculiar to the earth that it resists the revealing by withdrawing back into itself (i.e. the earth is never exhausted into particular worldly revealing, but instead conceals its inner depth, its inexhaustibility in revealing) (Heidegger, 2001b: 33–34). The ontological politics of ‘enframing’ (Gestell) operates precisely through this ontological play between the revealing and concealment – not just through it, but also by totally hiding it. Enframing turns the revealing of the world into orderingrevealing, converting the world into a ‘world-picture’, so squeezing the concealment out of the earth through the relations of calculability in which it submits the earth. Calculative enframing of biofuel assemblages simply does not allow the earth to conceal itself: it brings things into being by emptying their presence into availability in orderable and measurable frameworks of calculation, thus concealing the fact that the earth conceals itself through its escape of all grounding definitions. Calculating models, thus, do reveal things – after all, they are a mode of ordering-revealing – but at the same time they conceal the whole question of concealing-revealing through their intrinsic endeavour to order, measure and manipulate things. In other words, the calculative enframing of iLUC impacts sets up in advance the scaffolding of the world, that is, what the world consists of, and thus rips off things from their original topologies and vitalities of material emergence. As Anderson and Wylie (2009: 328) summarize, without acknowledging that initial conditions in an assemblage ‘‘condition but do not determine what emerges’’, there remains a danger of what Serres (1982) calls the ‘retrospective illusion’ of proceeding from the conditions to the products and not the other way around. This brings forth the second element constitutive for the Commission’s measurement of the iLUC impacts of biofuels: the obliteration of the complex geographies of topological relatedness, which we will next turn into.

4. Topologies of the indirect effects of biofuel production In this part of the paper, we will take forward the notion sketched in the previous pages – that the calculative modelling frames the ontological potentiality for the active self-emergencies of the earth – into a discussion about the epiphenomenal oblivion of the complex geographies of the actualized biofuel topologies. With topology, we thus want to acknowledge those indivisible connections and effects that human and non-human actors have with one another in the spatial constitution of biofuel assemblages (see also, DeLanda, 2006; Jones, 2009). However, at the same time topology is not only related to actualization (materialization), but also to potentiality. It is the ontological potentiality, which the calculative enframing takes control of by framing the becoming (i.e. presencing/materialization) of things through the denial of their potentiality not to be as calculations expect (see Belcher et al., 2008). Accordingly, the former discussion about the ontological purification of ‘enframing’ has enabled us, not only to locate a form of ontological politics in the heart of the biofuel enactments of the European Commission, but also to suggest that this politics of

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revealing has erased the topological nature of biofuel production. The models ‘enframe’ dLUC and iLUC by setting them apart from their originary sites of emergence, re-locating them to the purified frameworks of calculable presence. Yet, as the discussion of the earth aspect emphasized above, things are always partly concealed, never allowing themselves to become emptied through particular rationalizations, measures and ontological scaffoldings of the way the world discloses itself. To put it in spatial terms, although even a single place of a material thing is defined through its relation to other things – through its assembling and gathering – this assemblage does not drain those spatial relations that the thing may gain, either through the vital and active effects, disassociations and connections of the earth or through the affects, connections and disassociations created by the human action. Certainly, in order to properly take into account the actual land use impacts of biofuel production, there is acute need to analyse the complex place-based intertextures of things beyond the ontological politics of calculative scaffoldings. Although iLUC impacts, as Fritsche et al. (2010) rightly hold, are not bound up with certain agricultural species or locations near to dLUC, and further, although the trade of biofuel commodities deludes the origin of their production (Delzeit et al., 2011: 3), without acknowledging places, connections and effects of human and nonhuman actors, there is a risk of constituting topology- and politics-free landscapes of biofuel governance (see also North, 2010; Yan et al., 2011). By holding this, we do not want to embrace the scheme about intentional political activities of autonomous human subjects being the ground of politics. We rather understand agency as an effect distributed through the complex arrangements and heterogeneous associations of human and non-human that emerge through and out of the particular onto-topological assemblages. Although policy decisions and agencies have a strong capacity to steer biofuel development, biofuel feedstocks are not grown in the Antarctic due to the complex questions of land ownership or representation of Antarctic as hostile region, but because of the material environment that affords harsh conditions even for the most technologically advanced modes of farming. In short, iLUC impacts are influenced by the diversity of human and non-human actors and cannot be considered without details about their onto-topological emergence. To be sure, indirect land use impacts are not unique to biofuel production. As Latour (2005) claims, all action is partly ‘‘dislocated’’: agents never act alone, they influence and are influenced by other agents and non-human entities. We argue that a necessary condition for the emergence of the iLUC is precisely the unpredictable process of dislocation, which Latour discusses also under the formula of ‘translation’ (1987), later refining it with the term ‘mediation’ (1993: 20, 78), altogether referring to the general idea of relating. Such ‘dislocation’ is not merely a human endeavour, but also grows from the fact that things are always partly concealed – that they include a potentiality in themselves to be otherwise. As Tipper et al. (2009: 4) nicely summarize the relational character of iLUC: ‘‘Like ripples on a pond, indirect effects may be reinforced or dampened through interaction.’’ Accordingly, production of biofuel feedstock sets ripples in motion through the relations it has with other actors in another place where the intensity of ripples can be mitigated, redefined or further intensified through different associations and new translations. To start with, we suggest that iLUC can be approached as a topological sphere of connections between policy instruments of the EU, dLUC related to biofuel development, and dLUC related to other sectors beyond biofuel production (Fig. 1). As Fig. 1 illustrates, the topology of iLUC consist of the potential dislocations growing from the concealment intrinsic to the actualized land use changes (dLUC). The actual, thus, is always partly concealed and open for potential dislocations, which is why iLUC cannot be assumed as a

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Fig. 1. The sphere of iLUC. One two-way arrow describes an actualization of a direct relation, succession of two arrows an indirect one.

straightforward linear process caused by biofuel policies. As formulated through Heidegger, iLUC rather exists as a topological potentiality to become actualized as a dLUC in another sector than biofuel production, and hence, is always in a need of some sort of a dislocating mediator. Fig. 1 brings forth two central points. Firstly, instead of the causal relation between iLUC and dLUC, exploration of iLUC should be connected to those topological spaces of possibilities that the direct land use changes of biofuel production catalyse. As DeLanda (2006) has proposed, causal relations should always be treated productively: an event produces another event instead of merely implying it. The relation between these events, hence, cannot be fully characterized through a particular causal factor, such as economy that is seeking equilibrium, because the impact of dLUC becomes entangled with the multiplicity of other factors that can dampen or strengthen the impact catalysing iLUC. Therefore, the actualization of iLUC depends on dLUC without being exhausted to it, dLUC in turn being a necessary condition for the emergence of indirect impacts. By abandoning the assumption of linearity, dLUC can be understood in terms of a topological potentiality for indirect operations and associations to emerge – just as, for example, smoking tobacco has a capacity to function as a catalyst for lung cancer but does not necessarily cause it. While considering policies for iLUC mitigation, it should be thus acknowledged that biofuel targets do not necessary lead to certain quantifiable iLUC impacts, even though policy targets can catalyse changes in other sectors than biofuels (see e.g. Lapola et al., 2010). Secondly, instead of linear and causal chains, the focus should be on those modes through which human and nonhuman actors are mediated, connected and gathered together. In order to illustrate the role of mediation in the emergence of iLUC, we will pose three examples of different modes of connection – the fluid, the parasite and the fire topology. Each example will highlight a peculiar type of topological relation that cannot be acknowledged through the calculative framing of relations. Our aim is hence not to analyse singular biofuel topologies, but rather to show the complexity of those possible modes of relating, which the calculative approach adopted to iLUC by the Commission, is unable to attend to. Our illustrations are used to underline how biofuel assemblages should be approached through place-specific topological analysis, which focus on the modes of actualized spatial relations. Our first example on fluid topology is related to the disregard of the active nature of actors, including humans and self-emerging earth. Certainly, for the indirect effects to emerge something flows outside the sphere of dLUC. This may vary from the very concrete, such as people or cattle, to the change in the intensity of the medi-

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ator, which in turn has the capacity to catalyse land use changes. Instead of a linear relationship, it is more appropriate to understand these leaks in terms of fluid topologies: leaks outside direct land use changes emerge as actualized land use changes in another space in such a way that the connection between different spaces is neither linear nor reciprocal but rhizomatous – prone to disconnections and mutations. Fluid topologies do not have clear borders, scales or reciprocal dependencies between things; yet connections in fluid topologies do not change their characters continuously but gradually (see Moreira, 2004; Kullman, 2009). Indirect impacts may hence be multiple and changing, still being originated in the same direct land use change. By following Law and Mol (2001: 613), such indirect land use changes may be described as ‘mutable mobiles’: when actualized in different locations at different times, indirect land use impacts gradually change their connections and topological shapes, yet it still makes sense to hold that they are the same leak, catalysed by the same direct land use change. As a result of a biofuel plantation, a drove of cattle, for instance, may have to change its place, as well as its shape and connections, yet it still stays the same drove. Mediation in fluid topologies thus takes place through the variable and mutable connections, yet without changing the assemblage (such as droves) into another one. Accordingly, iLUC is just another name for the capacity of leaks to unpredictably flow out of the sphere of dLUC, and thus become actualized as a land use change in some other place. Nevertheless, the agro-economic models assume that the leak from dLUC is a market mediated impact and that markets always respond to this impact similarly, by seeking equilibrium. Such purifying ordering-revealing, the ‘enframing’, thus rules out this rhizomatous fluidity, the unexpectedness and variability of the play between connecting and disconnecting. The models, and the EU’s policies they guide, do not take into account how human beings and self-emerging materiality of the earth act and react – i.e. how things are capable of creating unpredictable effects that catalyse topological changes – and as a consequence replace the living earth with a controllable reserve. The relation between dLUC and iLUC may also take another form prone to escape the enframing of models – a form what Serres (2007) discusses in terms of the ‘parasite’. Parasite refers to the logic of ‘taking without giving’: it interrupts usual operations of things, forces the host to transform its actions, but eventually gives nothing back. As Serres clarifies (2007: 201–209), in a transformation mediated through a parasitic logic, three operations take place: the paralysis (disturbance of operations), catalysis (coercion of the host to transform its operations) and analysis (redirection that takes without giving). In other words, parasites are peculiar kind of mediators. What we like to suggest here, is a topological reading of the parasitic relation in a context of iLUC. Accordingly, the dLUC of biofuel production operate as parasites, which connect the exchange logic between the produced biofuels and their governance in the EU to the exchange order between the land and its original form of use. Biofuel production starts by interrupting: it disturbs the familiar flow between things and brings its parasite, the cultivation of biofuel feedstocks, in. The new arrival, biofuel production, forces its host, the land, to act differently – to provide soil, not for agricultural production, but for the production of biofuel feedstock, or alternatively, to provide soil for the same crop, now actualized through different assemblage of relations (sugar cane, for instance, can be used as feedstock for the food industry or biofuel refinement). Biofuel production interrupts (paralysis) and transforms (catalysis) the original land use mode, but it does so by taking the land to its own use without giving anything back to the original land use assemblage it supersedes (analysis). The parasite hence connects and transforms original operations upon the land by connecting the land to the new arrival, to the biofuel production catalysed by the EU’s policies. In other words, without proper recognition parasites connect different spaces together through abuse value: the newly arrived land use change (biofuel production)

takes the land without giving anything back to the original form of land use, which it nevertheless catalyses to transmute (from the food crop to a biofuel product) or to relocate (to move out of the way of biofuel production). What the calculative enframing of land use changes ignores is precisely the consequences of changing the prevailing exchange with the land, and thus, the consequences of those changes parasites catalyse. The problem of recognizing iLUC is not about the exact measurements of GHG values for different biofuel crops, production regions, etc., but of how political decisions based on these measurements create new logics of mediation and exchange, which paralyze and catalyse existing place-based topologies of land-use. Modelling, thus, remains unable to recognize the nonlinear form of parasitic transformation through which the exchange logic implemented by the policy support to biofuel production displaces the original ‘‘host’’ of the land, the prevailing land use mode. In fact, the ontological set up of enframing works precisely by owning this process of dislocation: instead of following those ways through which actual dislocations take place, models ontologically dislocate things to their abstract calculative set up. This second example on parasitic logic thus shows how calculative models deny actual dislocations, and hence the iLUC phenomenon, by ontologically dis-locating things away from this process of actual transformation. The parasite, however, does not necessarily have to be incorporated and accepted. Instead of adopting the new mode of connection, the parasite can be excluded (Serres, 2007: 34–35). By doing so, parties nevertheless need to convert their original topologies: while the parasite is not allowed to become a guest – i.e. it is not invested with a recognized part of the original topologies – it is anyhow affecting the formation of the assemblage through the process of its exclusion. In short, the expelled parasite catalyses changes through its absence. Although we do not need to follow any further the direction Serres takes with the parasite, the second form of parasitic catalysis, the parasite that is interior by being exterior, unfolds the basic nature of the third example of non-calculative mediation: the fire topology (see Law and Mol, 2001; Law and Singleton, 2005). Like the excluded but affective parasite, in the fire topology, a particular mode of presence depends on the simultaneous absence of the others. Such exclusion may of course work towards multiple directions. A road that was built on a new biofuel plantation, the effect it has on local communities – emergence of these kind of topological changes are shaped by the excluded others, such as the absence of replaced and dis-located land use form. For the actualization of the plantation (dLUC), the exclusion and dis-location of the original form of land use (iLUC) is hence an absent but interior condition. Alternatively, local communities may resist biofuel related land use changes, such as plantations, the presence of the original land use assemblage thus becoming inextricably tied up with the exclusion and absence of those changes, relations and policies that catalysed biofuel production. All in all, such ‘interiority of exteriority’ type of relation is an example par excellence of the non-calculative and non-linear nature of the connection between indirect and direct land use changes. Within all land use, changes thus remain blank figures, which affect without being present or prone to calculative measures. As our third example illustrates, perhaps the most evident lack of model-based biofuel policies is their incapability to take into account these affecting conditions of absence. Instead of exploring under what (ontological) logic biofuel topologies emerge, such models build scenarios on the basis of presupposing the logic of calculable linearity in iLUC formation.

5. Conclusions As the Commissioner for Climate Action Hedegaard stated in the press conference concerning the directive proposal on iLUC,

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‘‘technically iLUC is very complicated, but politically it is quite simple’’ (CEC, 2012b). We feel encouraged to conclude by suggesting the opposite: in terms of politics, as we understand it in onto-topological terms, the question of iLUC is far from simple, while the technical and regulative policy solutions enacted by the EU have the blind spot of being far too simplistic and naively universal. In short, they do not properly acknowledge the complex onto-topologies based on the active and lively gathering of geographical, material, and human elements. As we have presented, addressing the actual relational land use impacts requires deconstruction of the ontological politics of calculation that underpin the EU’s constitution of biofuel policies. Such deconstruction does not only help to acknowledge the topological constitution of space through the recognition of actual associations of biofuel production; by deconstructing the calculative purification of relations, the approach also opens up non-calculative points of entry for the inquiry of biofuels. Secondly, although the above-mentioned forms of mediation – the fire, the parasite and the fluid – are crucial for understanding the non-calculative nature of iLUC, we do not claim that the iLUC question is confined to them alone. It is equally important, as Cornelissen et al. (2009: ii) argue, to understand how ‘‘indirect impacts are impacts of biofuel production that occur as a result of market mechanisms’’. Yet, we wish to remind that market mechanisms are not the only organizing principles behind iLUC, and further, that they do not emerge without the human, material, geographical and ontological elements mentioned above. By this we do not want to undermine the fundamental role of neoliberal doctrines, which intrude the land into the sphere of market-based biofuel production in the globalization of calculative carbon spaces (see Joronen, 2013). We rather agree with Anderson and Harrison (2010: 15) that types of relations are and should be treated as manifold, as the work of Gasché (1999) nicely explicates. Presumably, new forms and ontologies of mediation do emerge in the fangs of time. Hence, a proper consideration of the iLUC question requires an acknowledgement of the multiple ontological forms of topological mediation, which, we argue, can be achieved through the exploration of assemblages that formed out of the living earth and human actions. Against the topological complexity of iLUC, the recently born proposal of European Commission, instituting a 5% ceiling for crop-based biofuels applicable contributing to target of a 10% share of energy from renewable sources in transport and the setting of iLUC factors for reporting purposes, looks more of a quick fix than an explicit solution for the problem (also see Johnson, 2013). Although we fully support efforts that encourage to use of wastes and other non-land using alternatives, there are still great risks for negative indirect impacts to occur within the EU’s biofuel development, particularly, since we see no reason for Latour’s (2005) topological point of dis-location not to continue to hold true also in the future. In order to properly explicate the effects of biofuel related land use changes, the focus, we contend, should be on actual topological relations, which the economic models, incapable of tackling the complexities of actual land use changes, including their topological potentialities, unjustly ignore. Though calculative, in the sciences of iLUC some efforts have been taken in order to locate topologically sensitive actions that can diminish the risk of iLUC impacts to occur (see Lapola et al., 2010) and to recognise actual mediators between dLUC and iLUC (Andrade de Sa et al., 2013). Politically, the Commission’s biofuel policies are primarily treated as a part of the ethos of the global scale technocracy of calculatory carbon governance, particularly common to the United Nations led policies of climate change mitigation (see Blok, 2010; Lansing, 2010, 2012; Levidow, 2013) rather than tackling indirect land use changes, for instance, in the context of the EU’s land policy (EU, 2004). Accordingly, the biofuel policy approach adopted by the Commission is not without consequences – it is connected to the

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