This is the first comprehensive work on Brazil's international ethanol strategy or ethanol diplomacy that has focused on the question of whether or not this particular policy achieved success at creating an international ethanol market. Fagundes (2013) offers an output-oriented overview of the major initiatives and suggests an unusual perspective on interdependence in the global biofuels sector. On the other hand, useful research has been undertaken on parts of the issue and several sub-topics. As a result, this literature review is divided into three major sections: research on global biofuel markets, research that has been done on Brazil's ethanol diplomacy in general and research that refers to specific geographical or organisational levels.

The research on global biofuel markets reflects the optimistic notion of the mid-2000s, outlining several of the structural assumptions that have been made before in this study. The research on Brazil's ethanol diplomacy in general will be further divided into three blocks: studies that focus on the actors involved in the process (the ‘ethanol complex’), studies that deliver a strategic assessment of ethanol diplomacy and studies that put ethanol diplomacy in the context of South–South cooperation.

The section on specific geographical or organisational levels will focus on literature that looks at the cases that are investigated in this study: the relationship between the United States and Brazil with respect to ethanol, between Brazil and Mozambique, and at the multilateral level with a primary focus on the WTO.

Literature on Global Biofuel Markets

During the second half of the first decade of the 2000s, the question of prospective biofuel markets was raised in a number of research centres. Most prominently, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) and the ‘Task 40’ group of the International Energy Agency researched these issues. While these studies are fairly optimistic about future biofuels markets and lay out quantitative projections and regulatory as well as material requirements for the creation of such markets, they do not explain why this endeavour has failed thus far. They do, however, outline areas of contention that we need to refer to when looking for possible mistakes in the Brazilian strategy.