Resilience and policy design in the emerging bioeconomy – the RPD framework and the changing role of energy crop systems in Germany

ABSTRACT

The resilience of social-ecological systems (SES) has become a major concern in environmental policy. The ongoing transition towards a bio-based economy essentially aims to address resilience challenges of the fossil-based economy. Its success depends on the resilience of the SES and bio-based production systems (BBPS) on which the bioeconomy rests. This paper introduces the Resilience Policy Design (RPD) framework to analyse and assess how bioeconomy policies address the resilience challenges of SES/BBPS. It combines resilience thinking and the ‘new’ policy design perspective, aiming at comparative research across countries, sectors and policy levels. It comprises five steps: determining relevant context conditions and the policy design space, characterizing bioeconomy policy mixes, identifying affected SES/BBPS and their resilience challenges, assessing the orientation of the policy mix towards different resilience capabilities (robustness, adaptability or transformability) and its resilience-enabling or -constraining elements, and overall assessment. An exemplary application focusing on energy maize in Germany finds a layered policy mix, addressing different resilience concerns over time. It demonstrates the inherently political nature of SES/BBPS resilience that requires inclusive, deliberative policy-making, the importance of policy feedback for adaptive and transformative governance with a long-term perspective, and the need for inter-/transdisciplinary collaboration to develop and assess resilience policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Governance
• social-ecological systems
• robustness
• adaptability
• transformability

1. Introduction

The resilience of social-ecological systems (SES) has become a major concern in environmental policy and planning, i.e. those areas of public policy that aim to protect natural resources, ecosystems and their functions and thereby contribute to maintaining the preconditions for the functioning of communities, societies and economies (Folke, 2006; Ge et al., 2016; Walker & Salt, 2012). Natural resources and ecosystem functions are harnessed for human purposes through SES at various scales, which combine social organization, human technology, and biophysical processes (Berkes et al., 2008; Ostrom, 2009). The functions provided by SES can be vulnerable to internal and external perturbations caused by sudden shocks or long-term stress that challenge the resilience of SES, i.e. their capacity to respond to disturbances while maintaining their functionalities and structures (Folke, 2016; Folke et al., 2010; Holling, 1973). Shocks and stress affecting SES may arise from e.g. degradation of ecosystems, technological breakthroughs, market perturbations, financial crises, loss of public trust, regulatory change or geo-political conflicts. The resilience of SES becomes an issue of public policy if desirable functions provided by the system – either public or private goods – are threatened and cannot be maintained by unilateral action, through market coordination or spontaneous, voluntary cooperation.

The resilience perspective is inherently systemic, dynamic and forward looking. It requires and enables us to understand how the entirety of public policies affects the resilience of SES, e.g. farming systems (Meuwissen et al., 2019), energy systems (Gatto & Drago, 2020) or restoration areas (Carpenter & Cottingham, 1997). But the resilience perspective is also inherently political (Smith & Stirling, 2010). First, the selection and prioritization of the desired functions is the result of political processes and power struggles and includes a distributional dimension (Lebel et al., 2006). Second, SES are often very complex, so that public policy must be based on limited system knowledge and predictability, creating an unavoidable politics of knowledge, uncertainty and ignorance (Turnhout, 2018; Wildavsky, 1988). Third, processes of innovation and socio-economic development constantly create new couplings between social and ecological systems, e.g. through mining in natural areas, or novel types of SES created through new processes, new forms of natural resource use and new bio-based production systems (BBPS), e.g. algae farms (Ge et al., 2016). These processes potentially create new externalities (in the sense of effects on third parties) – either known types of externalities in new places (e.g. land clearing in hitherto untouched areas) or entirely new types of externalities (e.g. antibiotics spill-over from shrimp farms) – that might require public policy interventions.

Many countries around the globe are now aspiring to transform the resource base of their economies from fossil to biological resources, moving towards a ‘bioeconomy’. At least 49 countries have published bioeconomy strategies (Kardung & Wesseler, 2019). The core of bioeconomies are BBPS, i.e. ‘social-ecological systems that combine social organisation, human technology, biological processes and ecological systems and their services for the production of food, fibre or biomass’ (Ge et al., 2016). While, functionally, BBPS are production SES, the term emphasizes that the bioeconomy includes many highly technical systems, e.g. aquaponics or laboratory meat, that have not typically been considered in the SES literature. Given the need to feed up to 10 billion people by 2050 and the increasing demand for other bio-based products (such as biomass, bioenergy, cosmetics or bioplastics) and services (such as tourism and healthier diets), the sustainability of BBPS has become a major governance concern (Ge et al., 2016). The resilience concept provides an important conceptual lens to understand and improve the capability of BBPS to provide the desired private and public goods and services, and how public policies and institutions enable or constrain the resilience of BBPS (Feindt et al., 2019; Termeer et al., 2019).

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the resilience effects of public policies on SES and BBPS in the emerging bioeconomy by proposing a conceptual framework that links the social-ecological resilience perspective (Folke, 2006, 2016; Folke et al., 2010) to new developments in the assessment of the resilience of BBPS (Ge et al., 2016; Meuwissen et al., 2019) and the ‘new’ policy design perspective (Howlett, 2014). Such a combination will allow us to address four important knowledge gaps: First, there is a lack of systematic insights in the contextual constraints of bioeconomy policies. Nominal bioeconomy policies and strategies have arrived relatively recently and address sectors – for example agriculture, pharmaceuticals, or energy – that have often well-established and entrenched institutions and policies. How does this affect the problematizations, goals, instruments and scope of bioeconomy policies? Second, from an SES perspective, the bioeconomy depends on the resilience of the SES and BBPS. However, there is no systematic analysis of the range of SES and BBPS affected by bioeconomy policies, whether and how these policies target specific SES or BBPS, and whether the policies include any resilience concerns. Third, there is little knowledge how the public policy framework enhances or constrains different resilience capabilities (robustness, adaptability, transformability, see below) of SES and BBPS. Finally, to enable the resilience of SES and BBPS in the long run, supporting policy frameworks must be resilient themselves. We might call this a ‘double resilience challenge’. But there is limited understanding of the resilience of bioeconomy policies (and of public policies in general), and of their development over time under changing circumstances.

Conceptually, we want to contribute to establishing resilience thinking more firmly in the domain of environmental policy and planning, with a particular view to public policy in the globally emerging bioeconomy. A few articles in the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning have deployed the resilience concept in recent years, addressing media discourses on urban flood governance in Mexico (Rinne & Nygren, 2016), citizen involvement in flood management in the Netherlands (Mees et al., 2017), the need for collaboration in flood disaster management in Australia (Smith & Lawrence, 2018), learning blockades in flood risk management in the UK (Goodchild et al., 2018), and learning pathways in urban climate change adaptation (Bellinson & Chu, 2019). A conceptual discussion of resilience has not yet been published in JEPP.

In the remainder of the paper, we first revisit the three lines of scholarly literature that we aim to connect – the social-ecological resilience perspective, resilience assessment of BBPS and the ‘new’ policy design perspective – before presenting the analytical Resilience Policy Design (RPD) framework. To validate its applicability and usefulness, we sketch out an application of the framework with a focus on the changing role of energy crops in the German bioeconomy policy as an illustrative case. The paper concludes with a brief reflection on the framework application and on key challenges for policy and research.

2. Resilience and public policy

2.1. Resilience as robustness, adaptability and transformability

The concept of resilience has variegated origins (Walker & Cooper, 2011). In SES scholarship, resilience denotes the ability of a complex SES to cope with changing environments while maintaining its functionalities (Bullock et al., 2017; Folke et al., 2010). In a public policy context, it is important to determine the social, economic and ecological functions of a system and the desirable level at which they should be maintained (Meuwissen et al., 2019). Following Anderies et al. (2013) and Meuwissen et al. (2019), three resilience capabilities can be distinguished: Robustness is the capability of a system to resist short-term shocks and long-term stresses while maintaining desired levels of functionality without major changes to its internal elements and processes (Urruty et al., 2016). It includes a capability for self-organization without the need for continuous outside investment or subsidization (Lebel et al., 2006). Adaptability is the capability of a system to adjust internal elements and processes to respond to shocks and stresses while maintaining all important functionalities and continuing its development without disruptions to its previous trajectory (Folke et al., 2010). Transformability is required when major changes in its ecological, economic, or social environment make a system untenable or dysfunctional. It is the capability of a system to maintain important functionalities by developing or incorporating new elements and processes to the point that its operational logic, identity and developmental trajectory are fundamentally altered (Walker et al., 2004).

2.2. Governance arrangements in SES and resilience

Important contributions to understanding the role of governance for the resilience of SES are based on the institutionalist approach developed by Elinor Ostrom and various collaborators. Ostrom’s earlier institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework had explained how governance arrangements enable the sustainable use of common pool resources, in particular by overcoming free-rider problems and other mechanisms that induce overexploitation of a resource and/or system deterioration (Ostrom, 1990, 2005). The IAD framework was later extended to include system dynamics in interacting social and ecological systems, or coupled SES (Ostrom, 2007, 2009). The resilience concept was introduced to focus on the vulnerabilities of SES and their ability to adapt to novel challenges (Janssen & Ostrom, 2006). Often SES have adapted to specific types of variability in their environment (e.g. precipitation or economic cycles), but might be vulnerable to other types of variability (Janssen et al., 2007, p. 309). This implies two unavoidable types of trade-offs: first, between efficiency/performance and robustness, as exemplified by intensive animal production systems that become vulnerable to diseases and zoonosis; second, between specific and general resilience, i.e. by devoting ever more internal resources to robustness to specific types of perturbations, the system becomes more vulnerable to other types of adverse events (Anderies & Janssen, 2013, p. 528). Because different vulnerabilities might expose different groups to adverse effects, prioritizing some types of resilience over others is a highly political issue that requires suitable governance arrangements (Lebel et al., 2006).

The SES framework emphasizes connections across scales and multiple levels of government. The ability of a system to respond to disturbances may be affected if new technological developments create new connections across scales, or if higher levels of governance intervene in the institutional arrangements that have enabled the actors in the SES to cope with variability in the past (Janssen et al., 2007). Both aspects are important for SES and BBPS in the emerging bioeconomy, where biotechnological innovations and new value chains often create new cross-scale connectivity, while the emerging bioeconomy policies constitute a new level of governance that can interfere with existing governance arrangements in SES/BBPS, for example if national support schemes encourage the intensive use of a resource or if a national regulation makes specific organizational forms for the regional management of a resource mandatory. Within these nested levels of governance, the public policy framework can enable or constrain the resilience of the SES/BBPS in general and the governance arrangements within the SES/BBPS more specifically (Daedlow et al., 2013; Garmestani & Benson, 2013). To address these cross-scale, cross-level effects, more adaptive modes of governance have been proposed (Chaffin et al., 2014; Garmestani et al., 2019).

Where an SES/BBPS becomes untenable, continued delivery of desired functions might require a system transformation, which can be either deliberate or forced upon the system (Folke et al., 2010). Deliberate transformations require transformability capacities, e.g. economic, social and ecological capital, diversity of resources and actors, networks and learning platforms, and supportive organizational structures (Folke et al., 2010). In emerging bioeconomies, transformability and transformative governance are important when SES are (to be) transformed into novel types of BBPS (e.g. algae production in coastal waters), or if BBPS become untenable or dysfunctional due to flawed management or internal governance problems (e.g. large-scale agricultural monocultures, overexploitation of fisheries, antibiotics spill-overs).

2.3. Resilience-enabling policies

When SES or BBPS that deliver desired functions for society become vulnerable or if SES or BBPS become dysfunctional or untenable, and if the system’s resilience capabilities do not match the resilience challenges, public policies might be required either to better enable the system’s resilience or to compensate for lacking resilience capabilities. For example, if an energy crop system becomes vulnerable to droughts due to climate change, the public policies can enhance the system’s robustness by supporting irrigation or providing disaster payments, its adaptability by providing advisory services and investment support, or its transformability by promoting radically different, ‘climate-smart’ forms of production, or even alternative forms of land use. Different elements of the policy framework might push or pull in different directions. The Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT) has been developed to assess whether the policy framework enables or constrains the resilience of farming systems (Feindt et al., 2019; Termeer et al., 2018), and the approach can be adopted to other types of BBPS and SES. A ResAT analysis identifies all policies that affect a BBPS/SES, extracts all goals and instruments, and assesses how each goal and instrument constrains or enables robustness, adaptability and transformability. The emerging pattern is used to determine the overall resilience orientation of the policy framework, i.e. whether it prioritizes robustness, adaptability or transformability, and the overall enabling or constraining effect on the three resilience capabilities of a BBPS.

2.4. Resilience and public policy design

While the SES literature on resilience governance and scholarship on the resilience of BBPS have proliferated, public policy scholars have been reluctant to take up the concept. Reservations include perceived limitations to operationalize and measure resilience as well as perceived barriers to include agency in a systemic approach (Capano & Woo, 2017). However, the resilience concept has become more influential in public policy, albeit often without clear conceptual grounding; e.g. the European Commission has adopted resilience as a principle of policy design (Manca et al., 2017).

The resilience concept has been adopted in public administration studies with an interest in the resilience of the policy output as well as the community and administrative structures (Duit, 2016), placing resilience as a core value along with efficiency and legitimacy (Hood, 1991). An important focus has been the ability of the administrative and community structures to withstand shocks and crises, to recover and rebuild, which are embodied in precursor, recovery and adaptive capacities (Boin & van Eeten, 2013). The ‘new policy design perspective’ (Howlett, 2014) – which aims at the design and evaluation of integrative policy mixes that include multiple instruments, multiple objectives, and multiple governments, which are arranged in complex portfolios of policy ends and means – emphasizes the importance of the ‘policy design space’ (Howlett et al., 2015). This is constituted by the government’s intent to engage in ambitious policy design (Howlett et al., 2015) and its capability to design policy, which is determined by contextual knowledge, sociological and ideological constraints and the political preferences of interest groups and governments (Howlett, 2018). Only high levels of both design capability and intent enable comprehensive and coherent policy designs, while strong intention with low capability leads to incremental policy adaptation, and low design ambition despite high capability results in muddling-through (Howlett et al., 2015, p. 299).

As historical institutionalists have pointed out, the policy context is shaped by institutional trajectories, path dependencies and policy legacies (Daugbjerg & Feindt, 2017; Lieberman, 2002; Pierson, 2000; Thelen & Mahoney, 2010). Policy design must therefore include a temporal dimension, e.g. through the sequencing of instrument choices to create policy feedbacks that stabilize policies and enable substantial policy change over time (Daugbjerg, 2003; Howlett et al., 2018; Howlett, 2019). Resilience then means ‘the ability of a policy to withstand challenges to its elements and to remain effective over time, even when deliberate efforts are made to alter, adapt, or repeal all or part of its original content or intention’ (Béland et al., 2020). Policy feedbacks that affect the design space at a later stage are therefore particularly important because they enable or constrain the robustness, adaptability and transformability of the policy framework itself. However, empirical applications of these perspectives are currently rare (e.g. Béland et al., 2020).

Overall, the recent adoption of the resilience concept in the policy design literature pursues a different but complementary research agenda compared to the SES and the BBPS literature. In order to understand how policy designs enhance or impede the resilience of SES and BBPS in the emerging bioeconomies and to identify which factors explain different resilience priorities and orientations in bioeconomy policies in the long run, we need to include an analysis of the resilience of the policy framework itself, and therefore to draw on insights from all three strands of literature.

3. The RPD framework

Our Resilience Policy Design (RPD) framework combines theories of resilience of SES and BBPS and the ‘new’ policy design perspective for the analysis of bioeconomy policies (i.e. policies that explicitly address the bioeconomy) and bioeconomy-related policy mixes (which include other policies that affect the bioeconomy without citing the term) and their effect on the resilience of the SES and BBPS that support and make up the bioeconomy. The RPD framework guides the identification and characterization of bioeconomy policy mixes, the target SES and BBPS and their resilience challenges and capabilities, and the resilience orientation and resilience-enabling and -constraining characteristics of the broader policy mix. It consists of five consecutive steps (Figure 1).

• Step 1. Determining the political, economic, social and ecological context conditions and the policy design space: Bioeconomy policies are not developed in isolation. They reflect institutional trajectories, actor constellations as well as broader social, economic and ecological context conditions, which can be derived from publicly available facts, indicators and statistics. Political context conditions include the character of the national political system, party systems and governing coalitions, as well as institutional trajectories that affect the design space for bioeconomy policies. Economic context conditions can be described through macro-economic indicators such as GDP growth, unemployment and inflation rates, as well as sector-specific indicators such as commodity price developments or production indices. Social context conditions include e.g. general human development aspects as well as citizen attitudes (e.g. towards bio-based products and production systems), but also broader discourses affecting the bioeconomy. Indicators for ecological conditions comprise e.g. air pollution, water scarcity, exposure to climate change, soil erosion and biodiversity loss. The context conditions affect the policy design space, in particular the willingness and the ability of policy makers to develop effective and coherent policy mixes for the bioeconomy that address societal concerns, and in particular resilience concerns.

• Step 2. Identification and characterization of the bioeconomy policy mix: Most SES research takes a specific SES as starting point and identifies the relevant governance framework, following a bottom-up approach. In contrast, the policy design literature starts with a specific policy and assesses its set-up, context and trajectory, following a top-down approach to policy analysis. Step 2 in our framework follows the latter approach, taking policies at the level of the nation state as a starting point since bioeconomy strategies and related policy competences are typically anchored here.

  The growing complexity of the bioeconomy sector and related policies makes it necessary to confine the analysis to the level of policy outputs, i.e. the direct results of governmental decision-making in the form of policy programmes, laws and regulations, and here to those policy outputs that explicitly address the bioeconomy. Together, these constitute a multi-policy, multi-goal and multi-instrument mix (Howlett & del Rio, 2015). After identifying legislative and other policy documents that expressly mention the bioeconomy, these sources – in particular national bioeconomy strategies – are subjected to a content analysis with regard to (i) policy problematization, (ii) policy goals, (iii) policy instruments and (iv) policy scope. The policy problematization constitutes the discursive justification of the bioeconomy policy, articulates its ideational framework and links it to broader societal discourses; here the RPD analysis is particularly interested in the articulation of resilience concerns. Policy goals are the stated aims pursued by a policy. Policy instruments are the techniques of government deployed. Policy scope relates to the sectors and BBPS as well as the spatial and temporal scales addressed by the policy; these can be derived from – and might differ between – policy problematization, goals and instruments.

• Step 3. Characterization of target BBPS: Combining elements from Ostrom’s (2007) SES governance framework and the SURE-Farm resilience framework (Meuwissen et al., 2019), this step characterizes the SES and BBPS that are targeted by the policy mix identified in step 2. It answers the questions resilience of what, resilience for what purpose, resilience for whom, resilience to what and what enhances or constrains resilience in the SES/BBPS, based on previous research, publicly available documents, interviews and workshops with experts and stakeholders (Meuwissen et al., 2019):

  • Following Ostrom (2007), the resource system (e.g. arable farmland) and the main resource units (e.g. arable crops including maize) are identified. This analysis refers to the question resilience of what.

  • Identifying the resource uses (e.g. energy production from maize) and main functions of the SES/BBPS (e.g. generation of renewable energy, income and jobs), i.e. the desired public and private goods and services, determines the purpose of seeking resilience of the SES/BBPS.

  • Identifying the governance arrangements that determine the beneficiaries of the SES/BBPS and immediate resource users and the beneficiaries of the SES/BBPS functions provides an answer to the question resilience for whom.

  • Resilience challenges that threaten the continued delivery of the desired functions of the SES/BBPS are identified, addressing the question resilience to what. Challenges comprise (a) economic, social, environmental and institutional shocks such as interruption of seasonal labour supply, regulatory interventions (e.g. a ban on pesticide use) or adverse weather events; and (b) long-term stresses such as increasing resource competition, climate change, decline of pollinators, and changing consumer preferences (Meuwissen et al., 2019, p. 8).

  • Resilience-enabling and -constraining attributes of the SES/BBPS (e.g. buffer resources vs. dependence on highly volatile markets) are identified to infer the level of robustness, adaptability and transformability, responding to the question what enhances and constrains resilience in the system.

  • A comparison of the resilience challenges and the resilience capabilities of the system aims to identify mismatches and vulnerabilities of the SES/BBPS that might require public policy intervention.

• Step 4. Assessing the resilience orientation and the resilience-enabling and constraining elements of the bioeconomy policy mix with regard to specific SES/BBPS. Here the bioeconomy policy mix is evaluated regarding its resilience orientation, i.e. the degree to which its goals and instruments address robustness, adaptability and/or transformability. The step also assesses which elements of the policy mix enable or constrain the SES/BBPS’s capability to tackle the resilience challenges they face. An assessment approach specifically developed for this purpose is the indicator system of the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT), which builds on a content analysis of relevant policy documents (Feindt et al., 2019; Termeer et al., 2018). The ResAT analysis includes all public policies that affect the resilience of the SES/BBPS, i.e. it is not confined to the bioeconomy policy mix identified in step 2.

• Step 5. Overall assessment. A synthesis of the findings aims to integrate the links between:

  • the broader context conditions and the evolving bioeconomy policy design space (step 1),

  • the particular bioeconomy policy mix (problematizations, goals, instruments and scope) (step 2),

  • the resilience challenges and capabilities of the SES/BBPS that are targeted in the bioeconomy policy mix (step 3) and

  • the resilience orientation and the resilience-enabling or -constraining characteristics of the broader public policy mix that affects the SES/BBPS (step 4).

The analysis can be conducted through in-depth case studies to identify mechanisms or through comparative studies across polities or policy domains to identify policy patterns. In the next section, we turn to the role of energy maize systems in the German bioeconomy policy to illustrate the application of the framework.

Figure 1. The analytical five steps of the Resilience Policy Design Framework.

Note: Arrows mark information flows. Source: Original contribution by the authors.

4. Exemplary application of the framework: bioeconomy policy and a bioenergy production system in Germany

While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully elaborate a particular case study, as a proof of concept of the RPD framework we present a sketched-out analysis of the German bioeconomy policy mix and its effects on one BBPS that is particularly important for the bioenergy sector.

4.1. Step 1: Context conditions

An encompassing ‘energy transition’ – replacing nuclear energy and fossil fuels with renewable sources – has been a major political-economic project in Germany since the late 1990s (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, 2019), with the Renewable Energy Act (REA) of 2000 as a policy corner stone. The REA was designed during a period of sluggish economic growth in Germany due to the high costs of the unification process. Farm commodity prices had been decreasing in real terms since the 1970s and the European farm sector was hit hard by the BSE crisis in 2000/2001. In Germany, a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Green Party, elected in 1998, pursued a strategy of ecological modernization, stimulating growth through investments in green technologies. A ‘turnaround in agricultural policy’ became a cornerstone of Green politics with vocal NGO backing. Strong support for bioenergy crops in the REA allowed to bridge the interests of the environmental movement and agricultural producers. During the later 2000s, doubts about the sustainability claims of first-generation bioenergy crops entered the agenda, but biogas plants had already been built and constituted sunk costs. After the financial crisis 2007/2008, energy costs and public debt became major concerns. The reassured role of an increasingly authoritarian Russia reinforced concerns about dependence on Russian gas and calls for more energy autonomy. Since about 2010, Germany experienced a long period of economic growth, creating the budgetary space for major public investments in research and development. The policy environment displayed a mixture of change and continuity, with Angela Merkel’s chancellorship and a Christian Democratic majority since 2005 being the constant, accompanied by alternating coalition partners (2005–2009, and 2013-present Social Democrats, 2009–2013 pro-business Free Democratic Party), the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany and the Trump Presidency. These factors favoured a focus on competitiveness, energy independence and farmers as constituency, while a strong rise of the Green Party since 2018 along with the Fridays for Future movement put sustainability and resilience concerns high up on the agenda.

Driven by subsidy schemes, feed-in tariffs and guaranteed prices established through the REA, the bioenergy sector experienced significant growth since the mid-2000s. By 2018, biomass resources (including biogenic waste) covered 8.4 per cent of Germany’s primary energy consumption and electricity from biomass contributed 8.5 per cent to gross electricity consumption (FNR, 2019). By 2017, biogas covered half of renewable electricity demands (IEA Bioenergy, 2018) and 8,500 biogas plants were in operation in Germany, an increase of 4,750 compared to 2007 (Daniel-Gromke et al., 2017).

However, negative impacts on land and water resources and food security became focal points of the German bioeconomy discourse (Dietz et al., 2018), reflecting the international discussion on land competition between food and non-food production and induced land use changes. Maize monocultures for biogas production changed German landscapes and biogas remained one of the most expensive renewable sources of power. These issues triggered calls for more attention to sustainability issues, climate protection, biodiversity and landscape conservation (Appunn, 2016).

The policy design space was initially shaped by the coalition of a Green Party calling for an energy transition and a modernist, business-friendly Social Democratic party. The paradigm of ecological modernization provided a shared ideational framework. The coalition displayed strong willingness and ability to implement a number of major reforms across policy areas, among them the REA. Hence, while industry and productivist agricultural interests were influential, the Greens had secured responsibility for the energy sector, with a view to phase out nuclear energy. Since 2005, responsibility for energy policy moved to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which has an ordo-liberal and industry-friendly policy tradition and was headed by either conservative or liberal ministers. Consequently, the willingness to engage in detailed regulations receded. However, the REA founders intended decentralizing the energy system, thereby allowing a large number of increasingly diverse stakeholders to participate in energy and electricity markets (Ohlhorst, 2016), opening up the policy arena and providing the rationale for more dialogical, inclusive and deliberative policy instruments.

4.2. Step 2. Identification and characterization of the bioeconomy policy mix

Due to space constraints, this analysis focuses on two key policies that represent current German policy and include the term bioeconomy in their title: the National Research Strategy BioEconomy 2030 (NRSBE) issued by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in 2010 and not updated since then (BMBF, 2010), and the National Bioeconomy Strategy (NBS) issued by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research together with the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMBF & BMEL, 2020), which replaced the National Policy Strategy on Bioeconomy 2014. The broadening from a research to an economic development strategy reflects a long-term policy evolution, as demonstrated below.

Problematization: The NRSBE emphasized the opportunities created by the knowledge-based bioeconomy for enduring economic growth, with Germany as a research and innovation leader. It stressed the need for holistic systemic solutions in order to establish climate-, nature-, and environment-friendly modes of production and utilisation and to design systems that are efficient, sustainable, and economic along the entire life cycle. Energy from biomass was specifically addressed with competitiveness and sustainability as main concerns. The NRSBE stressed the need to improve biogas concepts and to develop the scientific and process-engineering basis for the effective political guidance of the biogas sector. Ten years later, the NBS emphasised sustainability, circular economy and climate action as the key issues of the twenty-first century and pointed out that continued overexploitation of resources threatened the biosphere. The strategy highlighted multiple resilience challenges such as demographic change, shifting consumption patterns, environmental threats, competition between innovative bio-based and established products, low demand for many bio-based products, and land use conflicts that threaten ecosystem functions. The NBS stressed that the success of the bioeconomy required not only to substitute fossil fuels but to develop new bio-based products and processes that help reduce the demand for raw materials and energy. The NBS also accentuated the need for dialogue and interaction between science, industry, the public and policy makers to anticipate and prevent ‘undesirable developments’ such as ‘increasing demand for land biomass with limited availability’.

Goals: The NRSBE aimed to enhance Germany’s contribution to global food security, production of healthy and safe foods, sustainable agricultural production, biomass-based energy sources, and renewable resources for industry. In contrast to these rather productivist goals, the NBS emphasized the development of bioeconomy solutions for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recognizing and harnessing the potential of the bioeconomy within ecological boundaries, involving society and strengthening national and international collaboration. However, the NBS also displayed mercantilist goals, such as enhancing and applying biological knowledge, establishing a sustainable raw material base for industry, and promoting Germany as the leading location for bioeconomy innovations. In contrast to the NRSBE’s explicit reference to bioenergy, the NBS prioritized the production of biomaterials and referred the bioenergy sector to the use of organic waste and residues.

Instrumentalization: The NRSBE focused on support for technology transfer and other forms of commercialization of scientific results through improved conditions for business start-ups. Other instruments included research funding, science-industry cooperation, involvement of SMEs in research projects, coordination (e.g. joint initiatives) with federal states and other R&D-financing stakeholders (e.g. foundations), and monitoring of the strategy’s implementation. Following the broader policy trajectory, the NBS prioritized research funding too, but now for a sustainable bioeconomy through innovation, biotechnology development, support of SMEs and European and global cooperation. Other highlighted instruments were the (re-)establishment of an advisory council to support public debates and civic participation, the dialogue platform ‘Industrial Bioeconomy’ with various stakeholders, initiatives to promote training and skills development and a bioeconomy monitoring system. While the NRSBE focused on commercially oriented research promotion, the NBS took a more adaptability-oriented approach by enriching innovation policy with anticipatory, dialogical and deliberative instruments.

Scope: Problematization and goals of the NRSBE included numerous sectors such as agriculture, forestry, horticulture, fisheries and aquaculture, plant and animal breeding, the food and beverage industries, as well as the wood, paper, leather, textile, chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, and aspects of the energy sector. With specific reference to bioenergy, the NRSBE aimed at research promotion to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of bioenergy plants, approaches for the optimization of bioenergy generation and the compensation of fluctuations in bioenergy power feeds. The NBS addressed a broad range of economic sectors too, such as organic and conventional agriculture, forestry, fishery and aquaculture, chemical and construction industry, insulating materials, bio-based textiles, medical technology, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology as well as sectors using organic waste and residues as feedstock. It, however, did not expressly address biogas and emphasized that bioenergy should be integrated into more encompassing material cycles. Furthermore, the NBS did not focus on any particular bio-based production systems and did not include instruments explicitly for the bioenergy and biogas sector.

Overall, the NRSBE presented bioenergy as an important sector of the bioeconomy. This was no longer the case in the NBS, where the promotion of bioenergy has been replaced with broader concerns about the development of a sustainable and resilient bioeconomy. Energetic uses were now rather seen as the last stage of a cascade use of biological materials.¹

Both strategy documents referred explicitly and implicitly to a range of other policies and implied the use of a variety of SES and BBPS. In order to understand how public policies affect the SES and BBPS on which the bioeconomy rests, both the relevant SES/BBPS and the full range of policies affecting them must be identified through further analysis.

4.3. Step 3. Characterization of target SES/BBPS: focus on energy maize production systems

Neither the NRSBE nor the NBS specify the SES/BBPS devoted to bioenergy production. The REA had aimed to stimulate the use of biomass for the production of bioenergy in solid, liquid or gaseous form. The raw materials are generally produced as crops on arable land (e.g. maize, wheat, sugar beets, rapeseed or sunflowers), rapid-growth trees (short-rotation plantations), wood from forests and residues from agriculture, forestry, households and industry. However, by 2010, the REA had mainly triggered a boom in intensive maize production, setting off conflicts and public debates about a wide range of resilience challenges associated with environmental, socio-economic and ethical concerns (Gamborg et al., 2012; Mohr, 2013). The following exemplary analysis therefore focuses on intensive maize production systems for biogas in Germany.

Resilience of what: Maize for energy purposes is produced on arable lands, some of them converted former grasslands, with various degrees of fertility and in regions with different shares of landscape diversity. The production typically relies on heavy machinery and high inputs of artificial fertilizer and chemical plant protection.

Resilience for what purpose: Maize is converted into silage and then into biogas, replacing fossil energy sources, creating income for the producers and the SMEs involved and contributing to energy security and further to substitution of fossil fuels.

Resilience for whom: The biogas sector is dominated by numerous local businesses founded to develop biogas projects and manufacture plant components, as well as small and widely spread actors, some of them only partially involved in bioenergy, for example by supplying a certain type of tube or generator parts (Appunn, 2016). The biogas plants are often operated on-farm, making the farm the immediate resource user and beneficiary, delivering to municipal utilities, local businesses and energy providers. While the operating farms are often embedded in the local economy and community, bioenergy production increasingly attracts outside investors (Herre, 2013).

Resilience to what (key resilience challenges): The high prices guaranteed in the REA have incentivized the expansion and intensification of energy maize cultivation. This puts pressure on water resources and biodiversity through mono-cropping (ecological stresses) (Sauerbrei et al., 2014). The intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides decreases soil biodiversity (Gevers et al., 2011) and organic matter and thereby affects soil fertility and productivity (ecological-economic stress). Elevated land prices have knock-on effects on international markets (EEA, 2018 ) and induce land use changes abroad, while the conversion of forest and grassland to arable land is restricted in Germany, although less effectively in the early years of the REA (ecological stress). High prices for biomass have increased demand for agricultural land, inducing significant price increases for leased and purchased land (Appel et al., 2016). This has attracted external investors who have acquired large-scale agricultural land (Herre, 2013), outcompeting local small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises and often jeopardizing their viability (social-economic stress). Increasing environmental awareness among consumers and policy makers has led to more scrutiny of the sustainability implications of the bioenergy sector and less favourable policies and regulations, such as the 2017 REA reform and the National Bioeconomy Strategy (political-economic stress). Extreme weather such as droughts and floods have affected crop production (ecological shocks) and are becoming more frequent due to climate change (ecological stress). Sudden price fluctuations in energy markets might also affect prices for bioenergy (economic shocks).

Resilience attributes: Bioenergy has often been part of an economic farm diversification strategy, reducing vulnerability to fluctuations in markets for other products. However, ecological and weather-related vulnerabilities of bioenergy and other agricultural crops are strongly correlated. The strong political influence of the farm sector allows to mobilize public backing for market support, although the need for constant subsidization through administered elevated prices also betrays a vulnerability.

While many market-related vulnerabilities of the bioenergy-related production systems have been addressed by the REA, the ecological stresses and their potential long-term impact on productivity, partly induced by the REA, require further public policy intervention. The social and economic impacts of higher land prices and the implications of a potential market concentration might also be undesirable, particularly if the latter is fuelled by public intervention.

4.4. Step 4. Assess the resilience orientation of the policy framework²

The resilience orientation of the policy framework affecting energy crop systems has changed over time. The original REA aimed at a transformation of both the energy and the farm sector – replacing fossil with bio-based energy and turning farmers into energy producers. Such a (partial) transformation was indeed enabled through the subsidies, guaranteed prices and feed-in tariffs. Once the new bioenergy sector was established, further REA reforms until 2017 aimed to enhance its economic robustness by securing high and guaranteed prices – again quite successfully. The 2017 REA reform and the following amendments increasingly responded to the negative ecological impacts, moving towards an adaptability orientation that was inter alia supported by provisions in the Mobility and Fuels Strategy of the German Government (2013), the 7th Energy Research Programme (2018) and the High-Tech Technology Strategy 2025 (2018). The general approach was now support for research and innovation that takes ecological boundaries into account, and the strengthening of interdepartmental, national and international cooperation and societal involvement. Several procedural instruments have reinforced the shift towards an adaptability orientation, in particular the establishment of an interdisciplinary bioeconomy council in 2009 and an inter-ministerial working group in 2014, as well as the announcement of an encompassing monitoring system, certification and labelling and societal dialogue processes in the NBS in 2020. In hindsight, the move towards adaptability as the main policy orientation was probably accentuated by the 2010 NRSBE, which started to embed bioenergy policy within broader problematizations and goals. The 2020 NBS, which stressed the principles of sustainability, climate neutrality, and circular economy, no longer referred explicitly to bioenergy, and might usher in a transformability orientation of the policy framework, according to which bioenergy crop farms and value chains should re-orient themselves towards new use cascades, supported by a concerted bioeconomy and innovation policy.

4.5. Step 5. Overall assessment

The level of attention given to resilience issues in BBPS and the general resilience orientation of German bioeconomy policies with regard to bioenergy has increased over time (steps 1, 2 and 4). This was necessary because intensive maize production as the main biomass provider for energy in Germany faces severe resilience challenges from partly self-induced ecological stress and from lack of competitiveness and hence continuing reliance on subsidies or high guaranteed prices (step 3). In response to the evolving public concerns, the resilience orientation of the policy shifted from transformability of the old agricultural and fossil-based energy system, to robustness of the emerging maize-based bioenergy system, to adaptability of the now established but problematic system (step 4). This policy evolution reflects changing context conditions (steps 1, 2 and 4): The policy design space around the millennium – a government willing and capable of reform in connection with favourable context conditions – enabled the early REA as a strong and coherent policy design that was part of a broader ecological modernization agenda. In contrast, the design space of the NRSBE of 2010 was marked by the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis with its focus on growth and employment and a pro-business conservative-liberal government with few ecological policy ambitions. Consequently, concerns about competitiveness, budget costs and energy independence dominated the agenda and led to a focus on robustness of the new bioenergy sector, which also lobbied hard for the continuation of policy benefits (a policy feedback effect creating policy robustness). Broad criticism of the ecological and climate resilience of energy crops finally led to a demoted position of bioenergy in the context of a circular economy which now prioritizes biomaterials production and requires adaptation or even transformation of the current systems of intensive bioenergy crop production towards other products and value chains. This is reflected by an evolution of the policy mix towards the inclusion of more participatory, deliberative and dialogical instruments that foster learning and reflexivity (including accompanying research and a research programme on ‘bioeconomy as social change’).

5. Conclusion

The transition from a fossil-based to a bio-based economy constitutes environmental policy at the largest scale, but also its entanglement with other policy sectors. The success of this transition depends on the resilience of the SES and BBPS on which the bioeconomy rests. The novel RPD framework presented in this paper combines resilience thinking and the ‘new’ policy design perspective to assess whether and how bioeconomy policies address the resilience challenges of BBPS. It is intended for comparative research across countries, sectors and policy levels.

The sketched application in this paper illustrates how the RPD framework helps to address four knowledge gaps identified in the introduction. First, it shows how bioeconomy policies are shaped by well-established sectoral policies and interests. Bioeconomy policies constitute a new layer of policy without replacing the older ones, reflecting an incremental policy design space but also increasing the complexity of the policy mix. The broader, inter-sectoral scope of bioeconomy policies can lead to novel problematizations, as happened with intensive energy maize production systems in Germany. In this case, new bioeconomy goals and instruments were layered on top of the entrenched bioenergy policies, which were later adapted to reflect broader problematizations. Second, the German bioeconomy policies contained resilience concerns at the level of problematizations and goals but did not target specific BBPS, possibly indicating implementation gaps. In any case, it was left to the analysts to identify relevant BBPS, in this case focusing on intensive energy maize production systems with significant resilience challenges. Third, the resilience orientation of the policy framework towards energy maize changed over time, from a joint transformation of both the energy and the arable crop sector to enhancing robustness of the new, but still uncompetitive maize-based biogas systems, to adaptability once these BBPS were increasingly seen as undesirable. Finally, the bioenergy policy set out in the REA of the year 2000 proved robust and adaptable over two decades, being repeatedly readjusted to changing economic and political contexts. The bioeconomy policies emerging a decade later with their dialogical and deliberative instruments appear to enhance the anticipatory and reflexive capacities of the policy. The broader bioeconomy framework allows to address connections across scales and emphasizes collaboration between Federal and state governments, as well as European and international cooperation.

These findings can serve to generate expectations to guide the analysis and assessment of bioeconomy policies in other cases: we would generally expect bioeconomy policies to be layered on top of sectoral policies in an incremental policy design space, potentially creating tensions between layers as a driver of future policy change, with the resilience orientation and concerns depending on and developing along with the policy context. Methodologically, the application points to challenges in delineating the policy mix that actually constitutes bioeconomy policy. Furthermore, the RPD framework focuses on SES and BBPS that are not necessarily explicitly addressed in policy, leaving important conceptual choices to the analyst. Hence, environmental policy scholars need to adopt a critical perspective on the discursive constructions of bioeconomy policies and how they potentially influence the scope of the analysis.

Conceptually, our preliminary findings confirm the inherently political dimensions of the resilience concept. First, the desired functions of SES and BBPS can change over time – in our case from a focus on the production of crops for immediate use as energy plant to cascade uses and consideration of public goods and induced land use changes. Second, the high complexity of the issues leads to an intricate politics of knowledge – here moving from the initial productivist focus to the analysis, monitoring and contestation of ever broader ecological, economic and social effects. Third, the political and technological creation of new couplings – here between the energy and the agricultural sector – results in new externalities, e.g. effects on land markets and land use changes, which in turn create an increasingly extensive and heterogenous policy arena. The case also exemplifies trade-offs between efficiency/performance and resilience, here of the energy maize production systems boosted by the REA – the intensive high-input, high-output production methods have undermined the ecological sustainability and social acceptance of a system that has relied on subsidies and guaranteed minimum prices for its economic viability. Finally, the case illustrates what we have called the ‘double resilience challenge’ for bioeconomy policies: they must address the resilience issues faced by the SES and BBPS that make up the bioeconomy; and to achieve this aim, these policies themselves must also be resilient, i.e. develop a suitable mix of robustness, adaptability and transformability, responding to an ever-evolving policy design space. In our illustrative case, the German bioenergy policy maintained its policy core of expanding renewable energy sources, while it also adapted in response to emerging knowledge about resilience issues, an expanding range of stakeholders and changing political priorities.

What does this mean for creating policies and governing SES and BBPS towards a sustainable transition from a fossil-based to a bio-based economy? We want to highlight three challenges. First, the inherently political nature of the resilience of SES and BBPS makes any expertocratic approach untenable. From a resilience perspective, the selection and prioritization of desired functions, the unavoidable politics of knowledge in highly complex policy settings and the constant creation of novel couplings and interdependencies through innovation processes in the bioeconomy require a systemic and anticipatory knowledge base as well as inclusive processes of decision making. Resilience-oriented governance in the bioeconomy therefore entails institutions that enable anticipation, transparency, reflexivity and responsibility. Future research on bioeconomy policy and resilience could therefore benefit from links to scholarship on deliberative and ecological democracy.

Second, analysts of environmental policy and planning who are concerned with the resilience of SES/BBPS need to combine an understanding of the resilience challenges and capabilities of the SES/BBPS and of the mechanisms through which public policies enable or constrain SES/BBPS resilience. This includes a need to better comprehend which circumstances require which combinations of resilience capabilities (robustness, adaptability or transformability). Only a more systematic assessment can guide political decisions on the preferred resilience orientation of public policies and discover mismatches, e.g. if policy makers aim to prop up the robustness of an SES/BBPS that has become untenable (such as the unsustainable maize production systems in our exemplary study). Research on resilience policy therefore calls for an inter- and transdisciplinary approach, with the suitable combination of environmental policy and planning scholarship with other disciplines and practitioner knowledge depending on the SES under consideration (e.g. energy maize vs. coastal algae production or milk production for pharmaceutical uses). The RDP framework could serve as a conceptual bridge towards such a broader endeavour.

Third, while the SES literature has tried to identify characteristics of SES and governance arrangements that enhance resilience, the RDP framework links this interest to the analysis of policy mixes and the conditions of policy making (the policy design space). The analysis of policy feedback mechanisms in empirical cases could improve our understanding of the conditions and processes that make adaptive and transformative governance in the bioeconomy work or fail. An important aspect is that public policies which enhance the resilience of SES and BBPS require a long-term perspective. They must be resilient themselves. More empirical research is therefore needed to develop a more systematic academic and practical understanding of what makes a policy mix robust, adaptable or transformable. In this regard, the RDP framework introduces a more elaborate concept of resilience to the analysis of policy design to guide future comparative research on bioeconomy policies with a view to theory development and practical guidance.

These are essential challenges to the field of environmental policy and planning because the bioeconomy, if fully realized, would be too big to fail.

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their dedicated and constructive comments which have enabled substantial improvements to the manuscript. We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr. Peter H. Feindt is Professor of Agricultural and Food Policy at the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute for Agricultural and Horticultural Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research addresses a broad range of questions in agricultural and food policy, in particular links to the bioeconomy, environmental policy, sustainability transitions and the resilience of farming systems. Related interests include environmental and technology conflicts; public participation and conflict management; strategic communication, policy discourse and narratives; and inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. Peter is member of the board of the German Agricultural Research Alliance (DAFA) and chairs the Scientific Advisory Council for Biodiversity and Genetic Resources at the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. He is also a fellow at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys).

Dr. Maria Proestou is a policy analyst and institutional economist working as a research associate of the Agricultural and Food Policy Group at the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute for Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has worked as a lecturer at the Berlin Council of International Educational Exchange, University of Applied Sciences Berlin, and Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Currently, she works as a researcher in the project PolDeRBio and is lecturing at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her current research focuses on the governance of bioeconomy. Her fields of expertise are politics and socio-economics of sustainability transitions and institutional change and her research interests include the political and socio-psychological dimensions of climate change denial.

Dr Katrin Daedlow has a background in political sciences and institutional economics. Her PhD thesis integrated resilience thinking into research on the governance of natural resource management. A subsequent research project at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on property rights and transactions analysed the governance of land and water management in Germany. Further research at the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in the BonaRes-Centre for Soil Research examined the societal and political impacts of German soil management on soil functions and ecosystem services in the context of bioeconomy-related and sustainable resource use. Her recent research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin focused on developing interdisciplinary research designs for the comparative analysis of bioeconomy governance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany, under Grant No. 031B0789.

Notes

1 Nevertheless, they enjoyed increasing attention in the Energy Research Programmes (German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, 1977–2018) and its emerging focus on research funding to support the energy transition.

2 Due to space restrictions, we cannot discuss the resilience-enabling and constraining policy elements of the policy mix.