Perspectives on the bioeconomy as an emerging policy field

Setting the stage

The term ‘bioeconomy’, or, more precisely, ‘bioeconomics’ was initially introduced in the 1970s by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian mathematician and economist, who connected physics and economy. According to the laws of entropy, he argued, all economic activities have to be understood as eventually degrading the physical environment, thereby increasing its entropy while low entropy resources are getting scarcer and scarcer (see, e.g. Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). The concept of ‘bioeconomics’, in this context, ‘continuously highlights the biological origin of economic process and the human problems associated with a limited stock of accessible resources that are unevenly located and unequally appropriated’ (Mayumi, 2001, p. 1). Inferred from this, the bioeconomy of Georgescu-Roegen was supposed to be

a new economy, whose purpose it is to conserve resources and to obtain a rational control over the development and use of technologies in order for it to serve the true human wants – and not rising profits, warfare, or national prestige. We need an economy of survival or, rather, of hope – the theory or the comprehension of a worldwide economy that is predicated on justice and that allows for the wealth of the earth to be shared equally among its inhabitants now and in the future. (Georgescu-Roegen, 1978, S. 88; translation by the authors)

Nowadays, however, the notion of the ‘bioeconomy’, as it is mostly understood, means something markedly different from what Georgescu-Roegen envisioned (Grefe, 2016, pp. 36–40; Vivien et al., 2019). While it is still widely proclaimed by governments and corporations around the world as a new paradigm for a sustainable economy, the concept of the bioeconomy in respective visions or strategies is rather mundanely referred to as ‘the set of economic activities relating to the invention, development, production and use of biological products and processes’ (OECD, 2009) or simply ‘all sectors and systems that rely on biological resources (animals, plants, micro-organisms and derived biomass, including organic waste), their functions and principles’ (European Commission, 2018, p. 4).

However, the bioeconomy is still far from being a reality and – beyond this basic conception – it is highly contentious what the bioeconomy actually is or should be (see, e.g. Birch & Tyfield, 2013; Bugge et al., 2016; Levidow et al., 2012). Historically, the modern concept of the bioeconomy is rooted in strategic considerations for research and innovation policy of the OECD and the European Union (EU) starting from the mid-2000s (Patermann & Aguilar, 2018). In these research and policy agendas, the bioeconomy was framed not merely as an umbrella term for the agriculture-, forest- and marine-based sectors, but rather as a specific way of harnessing, processing, marketing and using natural resources based on biotechnology and commercialization. In recent years, however, this take on the concept of the bioeconomy is increasingly contested as broader and alternative concepts and visions of a post-fossil economy such as the circular economy attract more and more attention (see, e.g. Bugge et al., 2016; Leipold & Petit-Boix, 2018).

Simultaneously, however, the concept has also gained traction as a political project and numerous governments around the world have adopted bioeconomy strategies (see International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy, 2020 for a recent overview of bioeconomy strategies and policies around the world). The conceptual ambiguity and contention mentioned above can, however, lead to a certain vagueness and arbitrariness when it comes to bioeconomy strategies. Accordingly, they often lack focus and merely compile a bouquet of measures from the various policy areas of the bioeconomy rather than gear the bioeconomy towards specific directions or goals. Thereby, they inherit the path-dependencies and institutional incoherencies of these preexisting sub-areas of the bioeconomy and potentially also perpetuate respective socio-ecological conflicts and injustices on various scales (see, e.g. Lühmann, 2020; Ramcilovic-Suominen & Pülzl, 2018).

Nonetheless, the bioeconomy still provides a relatively new conceptual and strategic framework for these already existing policy areas. Thus, irrespective of its ambiguity and fuzziness, the bioeconomy already poses tangible governance challenges. What remains underexposed in this context is the question of how these path-dependent political processes, instruments and institutions actually mesh with the respective bioeconomy concepts and strategies. Do the former incorporate the goals and visions proclaimed in the latter or are they rather autonomous and possibly counterproductive? In turn, how do they affect the concepts and strategies of the bioeconomy and their further development?

Furthermore, in the context of these sometimes long-established policy areas of the bioeconomy and their path-dependencies, familiar socio-ecological issues and conflicts of biomass production and usage come to – or, rather, stay at – the fore. Thus, the transformation towards a bioeconomy (in whichever shape) will face or already faces well-known issues such as

• - land use conflicts and the competition between the production of the four Fs (food, feed, fiber, and fuel; see, e.g. Bringezu et al., 2009; Haberl, 2015),

• - the detrimental ecological effects of increasingly relying on land-based resources for energy and consumer goods production (see, e.g. Kastner et al., 2011; Krausmann et al., 2013), or

• - the transnational exploitation of natural resources and its regionally differentiated social and ecological effects (see, e.g. Backhouse, 2015; Fairhead et al., 2012).

Finally, the emergence of the bioeconomy also exerts disparate and changing inter-/transnational dynamics. While the concept of the bioeconomy is clearly rooted in the ‘Western’, OECD world, it has spread throughout the world and taken different shapes and forms according to the specific political, social or geographical contexts in the respective regions and countries (International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy, 2020). Furthermore, relations between the Global North and South are not only perpetuated in this regard, but also modified as new North-South or also South-South relations emerge in the context of inter-/transnational bioeconomy networks (see, e.g. Dauvergne & Neville, 2009; Gray & Gills, 2016).

Why a special issue on bioeconomy policy?

In the light of this multifaceted and contested nature of the concept and its political implementation, this special issue takes stock of the (proclaimed) emergence of the bioeconomy as a policy field. Thereby, it primarily aims at advancing academic debates and the state-of-the-art of bioeconomy policy research. This is necessary, because – even though there are already many studies and even whole special issues on the bioeconomy (see, e.g. Aguilar et al., 2018, 2021; Wesseler et al., 2015) – the specific political character of the conflicts coming along with the bioeconomy and related societal negotiation and decision-making processes remains neglected most of them. In political research on the bioeconomy, furthermore, the bioeconomy is often considered either a clear and undisputed objectiv e, which only has to be put into practice in a technocratic-instrumental way, or a rather abstract policy vision that is analyzed and criticized on ideological or philosophical grounds.

Thus, in our view, bioeconomy policy research can be broadly classified into two broad strands (see Böcher et al., 2020 for a recent overview of political research on the bioeconomy). The first strand mainly deals with questions of governance and policy instrumentation. These studies often have a rather technical or management focus on how to successfully establish the bioeconomy (or certain parts of it). Thus, similar to other fields of land-use related research, these studies on bioeconomy policy tend to reduce existing political conflicts to ‘management problems’ that can be resolved and coordinated through the ‘right’ governance structures and policy instruments to bring about technological innovation, economic efficiency, societal participation and ecological sustainability (see, e.g. Devaney et al., 2017; Gawel et al., 2019; Maes & van Passel, 2019; Mustalahti, 2018; Philp, 2015; Schütte, 2018). The second broad strand of bioeconomy policy research predominantly deals with bioeconomy strategies, visions and discourses in different world regions or countries. This strand of literature deals more with the meso- or macro-levels of bioeconomy politics and mostly takes a rather critical stance towards the concept and the way it is expressed by states and corporations. Thus, these studies focus on bioeconomy narratives and discourses (often revealing that they represent neoliberal imaginations of the economization and commercialization of nature that reinforce technology- and growth-centered bioeconomy visions and undermine social- or agro-ecological ones) and how they frame actual bioeconomy strategies (see, e.g. Birch, 2019; Birch et al., 2010; Bugge et al., 2016; Goven & Pavone, 2015; Hausknost et al., 2017; Levidow et al., 2012; Lühmann, 2020; Meyer, 2017; Ramcilovic-Suominen & Pülzl, 2018; Vivien et al., 2019).

While both these strands of bioeconomy policy research are valuable in their own right and important to help gain insights about governance challenges, policy instruments, dominant discourses and their reflection in bioeconomy visions and strategies, we think that they do leave a considerable research gap between them strands that in our view deserves closer academic attention. What is missing in most analyses on bioeconomy policy, thus, is a focus on what is happening between vision and strategies on the one hand and instrumentation and implementation on the other, that is, the very political processes of bioeconomy policy and its influencing factors. This also means that common political science categories such as power and power asymmetries, actors and their interests as well as institutions and path dependencies have to be brought (back) into bioeconomy policy analysis, which is what we try to contribute to with this proposed special issue.

This focus on the political, contested and conflict-laden character of the emergence of the bioeconomy as a policy field is the linchpin of this special issue. We have included seven papers that all focus on this issue while also reflecting the abovementioned multiplicity of perspectives on the bioeconomy, both conceptually and empirically. Firstly, we included a wide range of different policy perspectives on the bioeconomy. Thus, the contribution of Töller et al. lays the conceptual foundation for the special issue by asking what actually constitutes a policy field and whether the bioeconomy is already (becoming) one. The contributions of Eckert and Dinica approach bioeconomy policy from a conceptual perspective, asking what how the concept of the bioeconomy relates to the somewhat similar concept of the circular economy and how these concepts are actually employed in bioeconomy strategies and policies. Similarly, but not identically, the contributions of Tittor and Wilde & Hermans take on a discursive perspective, asking what discourses and narratives are shaping these bioeconomy concepts and policies. Baasch and Ladu, in contrast, rather adopt a governance perspective, asking what governance strategies and instruments are or should be implemented to deal with emerging social-ecological conflicts of the bioeconomy.

Secondly, in addition to the diversity regarding the policy perspectives on the emerging bioeconomy, the included contributions cover different levels of bioeconomy policy. While Wilde & Hermans and Baasch focus on sub-national regions, Dinica and Tittor analyze individual countries and Töller et al., Ladu and Eckert examine the supranational (EU) level. Thirdly, the special issue covers the various sectors of the bioeconomy from biomass production to biomass-based products. Therefore, besides four paper proposals with a rather overarching perspective (Wilde & Hermans), we included four with a (non-exclusive) focus on biomass production (Tittor: agriculture; Ladu, Dinica: GMOs) and three with a (non-exclusive) focus on biomass-based products, both energetic and material (Eckert: paper and (bio)plastics; Töller et al.: bioenergy and bioplastics; Baasch: bioenergy). Fourthly, we aimed at geographical diversity, because the bioeconomy is becoming a globally applied and defined concept. Albeit there is a focus on Europe, the special issue covers case studies on bioeconomy policies and discourses in Oceania and South America as well.

The contributions to the special issue

The special issue starts with a conceptual paper by Töller et al. asking whether the bioeconomy can actually be regarded a policy field. To this end, they develop an operationalizable definition of what a policy field actually is as well as hypotheses on why a certain constellation of problems, institutions, actors and measures establishes itself as a policy field or not. They then apply this conceptual framework to the bioeconomy policy of the EU and Germany and come to the conclusion that it cannot (yet) be regarded an established policy field. One of the main hindrances in this regard is the diffuse, ‘wicked’ problem structure of the bioeconomy, which leads to a lack of a shared understanding of the bioeconomy and an according lack of concrete, bioeconomy-wide policy measures that would be able to do so. Furthermore, this is aggravated by the fragmented institutional landscape of the bioeconomy, which is subdivided into various sub-areas that all have their specific regulatory cultures, path dependencies and actor constellations. Thus, Töller et al. characterize EU and German bioeconomy policy as a ‘conceptual umbrella’ for a somewhat diffuse and loose constellation of differently established partial policy fields rather than an established policy field in its own right.

The following contribution by Ladu finds many of the overarching findings of the piece by Töller et al. reflected in the EU governance of genome-editing techniques (GETs). While GETs could support the transition towards a sustainable bio-based economy, a regulatory framework aiming to enable this is still missing and hotly debated among stakeholders in Europe. Using the Politically Inherent Dynamics Approach (PIDA) – which shares some of its central features with the operationalization of policy fields by Töller et al. – as her framework to analyze this political conflict, she finds that the problem structure of GETs can – just like the one of bioeconomy as a whole – be characterized a ‘wicked’. Based thereon, there are is a multitude of conflicting views and opinions among involved actors on how to regulate and integrate GETs with the somewhat fragmented and changing institutional landscape of regulating genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). This, in turn, heavily influences the debates on alternative policy instruments and which one to apply to GETs concretely. Thus, the specific status of EU GET governance seems to largely resemble the constant in-flux status of the European bioeconomy policy in its entirety, thereby stressing the need of ‘a rethinking of the policy field considering all the factors influencing the dynamics’.

The paper by Eckert rounds off the trio of articles focusing on the EU by relating the concept of the bioeconomy with the closely related and equally (if not more) popular concept of the circular economy. Specifically, she asks how business actors engage with and frame these concepts and how these framings affect EU policymaking. While there is some congruence in how they engage with these concepts and also in how these framings overlap with the respective framings in policy documents, she highlights the framing competition on key aspects regarding the perception of environmental problems and potential policy solutions. She finds this framing competition to potentially soften the voice of the respective industries in the policy process and to impede cooperation among them. These findings largely overlap with those of the previous papers in terms of the complex, ‘wicked’ problem structure and with Töller et al. specifically regarding the handicapping effect of industry competition with regards to influencing bioeconomy policy processes in (mutually) beneficial ways. Moreover, Eckert shows that these industry framings and their congruence with policymakers’ framings nonetheless do have policy ramifications that, however, ‘point to a relatively static status quo, in which key policymakers’ and stakeholders’ viewpoints have limited transformative potential’.

The contribution by Dinica is closely connected to the two previous papers in that it combines the focus on the concepts of the bioeconomy and the circular economy (Eckert) with a focus on the issue of genetic engineering (Ladu), albeit with another geographical focus. Thus, she investigates New Zealand’s (circular) bioeconomy debates in order to grasp the visions of a bioeconomic transition the main stakeholders in these debates demand. In this regard, she distinguishes a ‘natural bioeconomy’ (BE-1) and a ‘genetic-engineering bioeconomy’ (BE-2) vision. Relating these and the vision of the circular economy (CE) to the actors that propose them, she finds two broad coalitions: one that revolves around BE-2 storylines of innovation and (bio)technology and one that revolves around BE-1 and CE storylines of nature conservation and an industrial metabolism. And while the actor coalition proposing this combined CBE-1 vision is slightly smaller than the BE-2 coalition, it is currently more politically powerful and the prospects for a bioeconomy transition along the BE-1 vision are therefore deemed ‘quite positive’, which deviates from the findings of Eckert and Tittor in this special issue and of other previous studies on the political power of bioeconomy visions (e.g. Hausknost et al., 2017).

Further broadening the geographical scope of this special issue, the paper by Tittor zooms in on a case from the Global South and analyses the economic imaginaries of the bioeconomy by Argentine biotechnology and agribusiness actors and how they shape Argentina’s bioeconomy. Thus, she pursues an approach similar to Dinica’s in that she uses an actor-centered discourses analysis to evaluating the political influence of certain actors and their narratives. Another similarity of the two papers lies in the special role of genetic engineering in discursively constructing the respective national bioeconomies. As opposed to the New Zealand case, however, Tittor finds an imaginary envisioning a biotechnology-centered bioeconomy to be dominant in Argentina, whereas aspects of agro-ecology or the circular economy are marginalized. Furthermore, this imaginary transcends the oft-diagnosed distinction between a biotechnology- and a bioresource-centered bioeconomy (see Bugge et al., 2016) in that it integrates them into one imaginary that envisions the bioeconomy as a biotechnological ‘tool for upgrading agroindustrial value chains and industrialising agriculture’. Politically, this imaginary of the bioeconomy is actively and successfully promoted by influential actors of the Argentine agribusiness and biotechnology sectors ‘who have appropriated the concept of the bioeconomy and use it to pursue their own interest’.

Wilde & Hermans take the special issue back to Europe, but similarly to Tittor adopt the perspective of imaginaries, in this case to deconstruct the attractiveness of bioclusters. Specifically, they investigate socio-technical imaginaries of bioclusters at the sub-national level in Germany and the Netherlands and ask whether, how and to what effect imaginaries of industrial clusters and the bioeconomy overlap in these. Building on the social science literature on sociotechnical imaginaries as well as on Q methodology, they find that while a bio-resource imaginary of the bioeconomy resonated with most of the respondents from the two biocluster regions, bioeconomy imaginaries were generally rather contested and conflict-prone. Thus, they ‘diagnose a lack of a societal consensus over the significance and definition of problems or attainable objectives’, which is just in line with the findings of Töller et al., Ladu and Eckert. Cluster imaginaries, in contrast, were almost unanimously supported across different stakeholder groups, which brings Wilde & Hermans to the conclusion that they somewhat paper over the cracks of the bioeconomy imaginaries in the combined biocluster imaginary and that thereby ‘the popularity of the cluster concept in policy and across other relevant actor groups helps the bioeconomy concept to gain traction’.

Baasch finally also takes a sub-national point of view and deals with one of the main narratives of a sustainable circular bioeconomy: the availability and utilization of waste and residual biomass (see, e.g. European Environment Agency, 2018; Klitkou et al., 2019). Baasch puts this narrative to test by examining the waste and residual biomass potentials for energy recovery as well as the barriers to and preconditions for their utilization in the German region of North Hesse. Based on reflections of ecological modernization theory and its role in the German energy transition, she finds considerable discrepancies between the optimistic assessments of these potentials and their utilizability by government agencies and research centers on the one hand and the ones by regional stakeholders on the other, who emphasize the amount of waste and residual biomass already in use and the manifold barriers to a potential expansion. Furthermore, her results show an underlying disconnect between the basic assumptions and objectives of governments and of regional practitioners in this regard, as to which ‘the goals of ecological modernization are hardly relevant for regional actors’, which casts doubt both on the feasibility and the desirability of a bioeconomy predicated on technological innovation and economic growth.

Concluding reflections

The contributions to this special issue speak to the perspectives on the bioeconomy as an emerging policy field introduced above in varying degrees. From a conceptual perspective, the papers by Töller et al., Eckert, Dinica and Wilde & Hermans show that the concept of the bioeconomy is still quite ambiguous and widely contested, both in itself and in its relation to similar concepts such as the circular economy. Töller et al. and Wilde & Hermans specifically demonstrate that this is due in particular to inconsistent and conflicting perceptions and definitions of the problem(s) that the bioeconomy is supposed to solve, which result in equally inconsistent and conflicting viewpoints on bioeconomy strategies and concrete policy measures to tackle these problems. Thus, one could conclude that the question of what the bioeconomy actually is or should be, which was posed in the introduction above and by other researchers roughly a decade ago already, is still largely unresolved. This is particularly striking since the pieces by Eckert and Dinica indicate that this is not the case regarding the concept of the circular economy (and also the concept of industrial clusters; see Wilde & Hermans), which thus seems to be less contested and ambiguous.

This longstanding contestation and ambiguity of the concept shape the policy processes of the bioeconomy in considerable ways. Thus, the abovementioned results by Töller et al., Eckert, Dinica and Wilde & Hermans suggest that this opens up a discursive space for connecting it to other concepts such as the circular economy and industrial clusters, thereby giving actors the opportunity to interpret it ‘in concrete ways beneficial to them’ (as Eckert put it) and to use it as an ‘umbrella’ giving them ‘the opportunity to slip under it and frame it in a way that suits them’ (as Töller et al. put it). This is reflected in basically all the contributions of the special issue focusing on the politics in specific countries and/or specific sectors of the bioeconomy. While Tittor highlights this with regard to the Argentine biotechnology and agribusiness actors and their ability to shape Argentina’s bioeconomy according to their vested interests, Ladu emphasizes that differing organizational interests in the case of EU GET governance cause divergence in the understanding and defining the problem structure and related solutions, which, similar to the case of EU bioplastics governance (see Töller et al. and Eckert), can lead to political stalemate and non-decisions.

While it might lead to policy stagnancy in some sectors, the contestation and ambiguity of the concept diagnosed across the papers of this special issue should not lead to the conclusion that all visions and conceptualizations of the bioeconomy are on an equal footing when it comes to their balance of power or their inscription in actual bioeconomy strategies or policies. Thus, by and large, the contributions to this special issue confirm findings such as the ones of Hausknost et al. (2017) of a dominance of technology- and growth-oriented bioeconomy visions in the political realm. This is supported especially by the findings of Tittor, but also by the ones of Eckert, Baasch and Wilde & Hermans (with the notable exception of Dinica, however). While the bio-technology and the bio-resource visions (Bugge et al., 2016, see) seem to be more or less equally powerful here, it is the almost complete absence of bio-ecology- or sufficiency-oriented visions in administrative, governmental and economic bioeconomy discourses observed by Tittor, Eckert and Wilde & Hermans that is striking in this regard (with the exception of Dinica again), which is line with the findings of Vivien et al. (2019) of a marginalization or ‘hijacking’ of the original vision of the bioeconomy of Georgescu-Roegen referred to above. In this context, Baasch shows that this might not only lead to a negligence of more decentralized and small-scale incarnations of the bioeconomy potentially better able to tackle socio-ecological issues such as resource and land use competition or the detrimental effects of industrialized agriculture, forestry and fishery, but also causes paradigmatic disconnects between governments and regional practitioners regarding basic assumptions and goals of the bioeconomy.

The papers of Dinica and Tittor, finally, show the high value of diverse geographical perspectives on the emerging bioeconomy. Especially the contribution by Tittor points to what gets lost by the prevalent Eurocentricity of political and scientific discourses of the bioeconomy (which is, to be honest, also largely true for this special issue). Thus, even though the Argentine and New Zealand cases are by no means similar in terms of the structure of the debates on their respective bioeconomies (and New Zealand is only in the geographical south, not in the Global South), they show some conspicuous similarities that deviate from the other papers in this special issue. On a conceptual level, it is striking that it is precisely these two non-European cases that do not align with the prevalent typology of bioeconomy visions by Bugge et al. (2016), and therefore required modification. This is partly due to another commonality of the two cases: the meaning of GMOs for their respective bioeconomies, which in both cases can be traced back to the longstanding support for and the permissive regulation of GMOs in the two countries. GMOs also play an important role in the bioeconomies of other regions, of course, which for example Ladu illustrates in her paper. However, the papers of Tittor and Dinica show that GMOs have a much more essential meaning for the bioeconomies of Argentina and New Zealand, which might be very a country-specific thing and not representative for countries from the southern hemisphere, but nonetheless illustrates possible blind spots of an Eurocentric research perspective on the bioeconomy.

Overall, the papers of this special issue in their entirety demonstrate that the bioeconomy in all its geographical, sectoral, discursive and political diversity is still somewhat of a moving target for the social sciences. Nonetheless, they also show that research has made progress in understanding the phenomenon of the emerging bioeconomy in terms of its conceptual ambiguity and controversy, the underlying discursive foundations and worldviews, the disparate and uneven interests and power relations of involved actors and their reflection in strategic action and policy processes at different spatial scales and in different geographical regions. Thus, this special issue critically engages with the multifaceted issue of the emerging bioeconomy as a policy field, both in a comprehensive manner and from a multitude of angles. Given this variety of its perspectives, it should therefore be a valuable contribution to not only academic debates on environmental policy and planning, but also point out avenues for future research on the bioeconomy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research under grant number FKZ 031B0227.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Vogelpohl

Thomas Vogelpohl graduated in political science from the Universities in Potsdam and Bologna in 2008. After a year as Junior Researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, he worked at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW) in Berlin from 2009 on. In the context of the junior research group ‘Fair Fuels? Biofuels between dead end and energy transition’ funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), he analyzed the German and European biofuels policy, which also was the subject of his doctoral thesis. After he received his doctorate from the Environmental Policy Research Centre (FFU) of the Free University of Berlin by the end of 2016, Thomas Vogelpohl started working at the FernUniversität in Hagen at the Chair for Policy Research and Environmental Politics as a post-doc researcher.

Annette Elisabeth Töller

Annette Elisabeth Töller studied political science and public law at the University of Hamburg and received her PhD from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2000. Since 2009, she has been a professor of Policy Research and Environmental Politics at the FernUniversität in Hagen, where she has also been Scientific Director of the interdisciplinary Master's Degree in Environmental Sciences (infernum) since 2015. In 2020 she was appointed a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment (Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen), which advises the German government on environmental issues. She conducts research on policies in general and environmental policy in particular and has been head of the BMBF research project ‘Political Processes of the Bioeconomy between Economy and Ecology’ since early 2017.