Guest Editorial

The imaginaries and governance of 'biofueled futures' Since the 1990s governments in both the Global North and the Global South have been heavily promoting liquid biofuels and enacting policies as a result of concerns related to climate change mitigation, energy security, and rural development.Policy discourses about future technological pathways and landscapes have also been based on framing the lack of energy as an impediment to development and growth (Smith, 2010;Wilkinson and Herrera, 2010).Liquid biofuels have been portrayed as an attractive technological pathway because they can address disparate problems at once without fundamentally altering prevailing energy consumption practices (Smith, 2010;White and Dasgupta, 2010).They are already a major 'renewable' energy source in the United States, Brazil, and the European Union where they are presented as a way to sustainably transition away from fossil fuels in the future (Birch and Calvert, forthcoming).While biofuels come in many forms, the focus of this theme issue is on liquid biofuels.Liquid biofuels are important because of their use in transportation as 'drop-in' fuels that are immediately compatible with an existing transportation infrastructure built around internal combustion engines.This promotion of drop-in biofuels has been particularly the case in capital-intensive industries, such as aviation, where finding alternatives to fossil fuels is difficult given large-scale investments in infrastructure and the time needed to bring about technological change and embed sustainable energy management systems.In this theme issue, we examine how the biofuel sector (and those supporting it) aligned the future visions or promises of liquid biofuels within prevailing forms and practices of governance.We use the concept of 'imaginaries' to denote these future visions and promises, building on the work of Jasanoff (2004), Jessop (2005; 2009), Jasanoff and Kim (2009), Birch et al (2010; forthcoming), Fairclough (2010), Levidow et al ( 2012), and others.The concept of imaginaries is helpful in this regard because it explicitly concerns the enrolment of imaginings of the future in the forms and practices of governance in the present.Imaginaries (eg, visions and narratives) come to define what "could or should be" (Fairclough, 2010, page 266)-and what cannot or should not be-and, in this way, they shape future objectives, strategies, and realities (Levidow et al, 2012).As we highlight in this theme issue, these imaginaries are spatially bounded as much as they are future oriented; they are centred on specific geographical spaces, places and territories and concern the construction of economic (Jessop, 2005) and social (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009) orders.What makes them such a useful concept in this context is that imaginaries contribute to an understanding of the diversity and variety between places; they help to show what underpins geographical specificity and what this means for the development of socio-techno-economic pathways.The papers included in this theme issue all revolve around understanding how (different) imaginaries of biofueled futures have been created, how they have changed as events unfolded over time, and how they are enrolled in the governance of biofuels development.What brings the contributions together is their focus on how these imaginaries represent biofuels as appropriate, attractive, and sustainable technologies within specific, geographically situated governance practices that, therefore, are meant to deliver on such imaginaries and maintain them accordingly.Thus, the contributors share an interest in explaining how policy and governance mechanisms that have been rolled out are shaped and sustained by specific biofueled futures, whose contours are constantly evolving.