Patterns of European bioeconomy policy. Insights from a cross-case study of three policy areas

ABSTRACT

The concept of the bioeconomy has risen to great popularity with governments around the world as a new paradigm for a sustainable economy. However, it is still highly contentious what the bioeconomy actually is or should be, which results in a certain vagueness of bioeconomy policy strategies. European bioeconomy policy is a prime example of this. Despite two dedicated bioeconomy strategies, it appears to be highly fragmented and heterogeneous when it comes to concrete political processes and measures. Against this backdrop, we aim to find patterns of European bioeconomy policy by applying the political process-inherent dynamics approach (PIDA) to the three sub-areas of bioplastics, biofuels and bioenergy. Aggregating the respective results, the overarching pattern of European bioeconomy policy is rather shaped by the interplay of specific problem structures, institutional frameworks and actor constellations in its policy sub-areas than by the ambiguous umbrella concept of the bioeconomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioeconomy
• bioenergy
• bioplastics
• biofuels
• policy processes
• European Union

Acknowledgments

We thank our interviewees for their time and insights, the editors and reviewers for their thorough and helpful comments and recommendations, Alexander Bollmann for his groundwork on the bioplastics case study and Robin van Parijs and Britta Oelke for assisting with the layout and formatting of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The aim of this strategy was the update of the 2012 strategy (European Commission 2012), which had been criticized for being too market- and technology-oriented and for disregarding critical aspects about the availability and sustainability of biomass sources and biomass-based products (Ronzon and Sanjuán 2020). While maintaining the main objectives of the 2012 strategy, the updated strategy thus specifically aims to also ‘Deploy local bioeconomies rapidly across Europe’ and to ‘Understand the ecological boundaries of the bioeconomy’ (European Commission 2018b). However, while alternative concepts such as agroecology and planetary boundaries are now mentioned, ‘the further expansion of the bioeconomy is seen as a means to solve environmental problems, while the logic of growth reproduced by this position and its ecological consequences are never fundamentally questioned’ (Lühmann 2020, p. 8).

2. We disregard situational aspects in the remainder of this contribution, however, since they did not play major roles in our three case studies.

3. We use the term ‘bioenergy’ to refer to biomass use in the power and heat sector only, excluding biomass use in the transport sector.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [FKZ 031B0227].