Abstract
Over the last decade, bioeconomy policies, guided by integrated bioeconomy strategies, have developed. This paper presents a systematic and comparative analysis of official bioeconomy strategies of the EU, Germany, OECD, Sweden and the USA with regard to their context, visions and guiding implementation principles. In an additional step, the relationship between these strategies and important scientific and societal debates around bioeconomy is assessed. In conclusion, five major stumbling blocks for the further development of the bioeconomy are worked out. First, there is the risk of disappointment because far-reaching promises of the strategies are difficult to achieve. Second, the bioeconomy is not the only way to a low carbon economy so alternatives could impede the desired development. Third, persistent conflicts between the different uses of biomass for food, material and energy production could lead to unstable policy support with short-term shifts. Fourth, a broader success of new bioeconomy value chains could trigger new societal conflicts over bioeconomy if efficiency gains, cascading use, residue use and sustainability certification are not sufficient to ensure a sustainable supply of biomass. Fifth, the acceptance of bioeconomy could be compromised if bioeconomy policies continue to ignore the on-going societal debates on agriculture and food.
Highlights
Over the last ten years, bioeconomy has become an important issue in research and innovation policy making, especially in industrialised countries
Many countries have a tradition of biotechnology and biofuel policies, and bioeconomy policy in many of these countries is restricted to strategies for these subdomains [7]
The aim of this paper is to present a systematic and comparative analysis of important official bioeconomy strategies as key instruments for structuring and promoting this new policy field
Summary
Over the last ten years, bioeconomy has become an important issue in research and innovation policy making, especially in industrialised countries. The term “bioeconomy” was already introduced in the early 1970s by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in the context of his work on applying the thermodynamic law of entropy to economic processes [1]. This first understanding of bioeconomy was based on the insight that the economic process has physical and biological roots and cannot ignore their limitations [2]. The number of countries with an integrated bioeconomy strategy including all facets of the bioeconomy is restricted. In the EU, only Finland, Flanders, Germany and Sweden have such an integrated strategy [8], and more recently France and Spain
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