Is bioeconomy policy a policy field? A conceptual framework and findings on the European Union and Germany

ABSTRACT

Bioeconomy policy is often labelled a policy field or at least an emerging policy field. But is it really one? And how can one tell and what does it mean? Drawing on the scarce research on what exactly are policy fields and what are the factors driving their emergence, we aim to answer these questions based on the definition of a policy field as a specific and long-term constellation of related problems, actors, institutions and instruments. Empirically drawing on the European Union and Germany, in a first step we find that bioeconomy policy can be characterised as an emerging policy field at most, as it is limitedly institutionalised and lacks a genuinely bioeconomy-related actor constellation and problem structure. Moreover, there are hardly any bioeconomy-specific instruments in place. In a second step, we find that the fragmented institutional and regulatory landscape particularly hinders the establishment of bioeconomy policy as a policy field, as do the ambiguity and inconsistency of its overarching goals as well as its fragile supportive actor constellations. As a result, bioeconomy policy to date rather serves as a conceptual umbrella for a number of already existing policies, so far with little tangible effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioeconomy
• policy analysis
• policy fields
• environmental policy
• European Union
• Germany

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These institutional frameworks, which exist in many sub-areas of the bioeconomy such as bioenergy or the wood-based sector (see, e.g., Gawel et al., 2018; Pannicke et al., 2015; Purkus et al., 2017), are often much older than the bioeconomy itself, have developed their own institutional foundations and path dependencies largely autonomously from bioeconomy strategies or programs.

2 Again, just as with the institutional frameworks (see previous footnote), there are instead established actor networks in many sub-sectors of the bioeconomy such as the wood-based sector (see, e.g., Giurca, 2020; Giurca & Metz, 2018), that, however, have developed largely autonomously from the bioeconomy as a political project and are therefore not considered genuine bioeconomy actors or actor networks here.

3 https://bioeconomyalliance.eu/about-euba-bioeconomyalliance

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes on contributors

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.

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 analysed 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.

Katrin Beer

Katrin Beer studied Ethnology/Geography (B.A.) and Geography of Global Change (M.Sc.) at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. She worked as a research assistant at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Institute of Environmental Social Sciences and Geography in Freiburg as well as for the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER/KIT) in Karlsruhe. In the frame of her studies and her work as a research assistant, she conducted empirical social science research in Germany, Indonesia, Namibia and Thailand. In her master thesis, she investigated the potential of facade greening for sustainable urban development and subsequently completed a six month lasting internship in the project ‘Connective Cities’ for the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)’ in Bonn. Since 2017, she works for the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg as a research associate at the Chair for Political Science and Sustainable Development.

Michael Böcher

Michael Böcher is a Professor of Political Science and Sustainable Development at the Otto-von Guericke University Magdeburg. His research and teaching interests are ‘Environmental and Sustainability politics’, especially in the areas of climate change, nature conservation, and regional development. Other important research areas are Scientific Policy Advice and scientific knowledge transfer in environmental sciences. Prof. Böcher studied Political Science, Economics and Media Studies at the University Marburg. Following his work as research group leader in the Department of Forest and Nature Conservation Policy at the University Göttingen he completed his doctoral thesis there. In 2015 Böcher moved to the Institute for Political Science of the FernUniversität in Hagen, before in 2016, he accepted the full professorship of Political Science at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.