Drawing on the literature on the market and normative power of the EU, we document and explain the limited success of the EU in transferring its environmental standards with respect to sustainable biofuels governance to the world's two largest biofuels producers – the US and Brazil – and to two international standard setting organizations, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP). Our explanation highlights four factors: first, the extent to which EU strategies to strengthen its market power can undermine its normative power; second, the limits to EU policy influence posed by other actors' use of their own market and normative power resources; third, the diminished influence of a late policy‐mover; and fourth, the difficulty of establishing normative leadership in a policy field subject to epistemic contestation.