Bioeconomic fiction between narrative dynamics and a fixed imaginary: Evidence from India and Germany

Jonathan Friedrich,Jana Zscheischler,Katharina Najork,Markus Keck

doi:10.1016/j.spc.2021.12.026

Abstract

Bioeconomic ideas and visions have received increasing attention from scientists and policy makers to address socioecological challenges. However, the role of imagined futures in the design of bioeconomic innovations and transitions has hitherto been widely neglected. In this study, we therefore explore the role of imaginaries of the future to understand how they shape bioeconomic innovations and transitions. We thereby build on insights from economic sociology and compare two distinct case studies from Germany and India. Based on our results, we inductively develop an analytic model that describes the co-constitution of imaginaries, fictional expectations, narratives, and innovation dynamics. Our results show that narrative dynamics are caused by irritations in the political and discursive landscape; these irritations prompt economic actors to stabilize, adapt, or reject their own bioeconomic conceptions, while the underlying imaginary of a technological fix remains fixed. We discuss this reductionist imaginary and instead plead for an imaginary of a socioecological fix that reintertwines technologies with their underlying societal, cultural, and ecological factors. We conclude that this will support sustainability scholars and policy makers in remaining vigilant against premature mental and institutional lock-ins that could lead to a colonization of the future with severe negative implications for society's ability to mitigate and adapt to global environmental change in the future.

Highlights

IntroductionThe notion of a “bioeconomy” or “biobased economy” has become popular among scientists and policy makers as an innovative economic model for addressing the grand societal challenges that accompany global environmental change (Folke et al, 2021; Giampietro and Funtowicz, 2020)
In recent years, the notion of a “bioeconomy” or “biobased economy” has become popular among scientists and policy makers as an innovative economic model for addressing the grand societal challenges that accompany global environmental change (Folke et al, 2021; Giampietro and Funtowicz, 2020)
We found that these narratives inform different dynamics that can be triggered by irritations on discursive or political levels

Summary

Introduction

The notion of a “bioeconomy” or “biobased economy” has become popular among scientists and policy makers as an innovative economic model for addressing the grand societal challenges that accompany global environmental change (Folke et al, 2021; Giampietro and Funtowicz, 2020). Given the wide spectrum of aims and fields of application accompanied by this notion, some authors even propose that the bioeconomy be perceived as a “panacea” by policy makers for obstacles to reconciling the efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the limitations of the planet’s life support systems (Giampietro, 2019). To bring some order to the situation, we refer to Bugge et al (2016), who identified three major visions of the bioeconomy, namely, the “bio-technology vision”, the “bioresource vision”, and the “bio-ecology vision”. The “bio-ecology vision” is driven by the goal of fostering sustainability, biodiversity, and ecosystem conservation through the development of integrated production systems and high-quality products. According to Hausknost et al (2017), the “bio-technology vision” emerged first, while the other two visions followed later.

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