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Forests, Fuel, or Food? Competing Coalitions and Biofuels Policy Making in the Philippines

The first country in Southeast Asia to enact legislation on biofuels, the Republic of the Philippines is recognized as a model for its decisive mandates in this area. This article uses the Philippine case to elucidate how competition among policy coalitions plays out in the formation and change of biofuels policy. Through content analysis of newspaper articles and government documents published from 2002 to 2009, we identify four active discourse coalitions: Biofuels Proponents, Technical Viability, Food Security, and Forest Conservation. Together, these coalitions maintain the political salience of biofuel debates in the Philippines. In these debates, the Forest Conservation coalition was particularly weak, resulting in its relative inability to influence the country’s biofuels policy. Its weakness may be attributed to perceptions among policy makers and the general public that forest conservation has no immediate socioeconomic relevance, and that, given their dismal state, primary forestlands across much of the archipelago lack significant environmental value.