Abstract
More than forty states worldwide currently pursue explicit political strategies to expand and promote their bioeconomies. This paper assesses these strategies in the context of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our theoretical framework differentiates between four pathways of bioeconomic developments. The extent to which bioeconomic developments along these pathways lead to increased sustainability depends on the creation of effective governance mechanisms. We distinguish between enabling governance and constraining governance as the two fundamental political challenges in setting up an effective governance framework for a sustainable bioeconomy. Further, we lay out a taxonomy of political support measures (enabling governance) and regulatory tools (constraining governance) that states can use to confront these two political challenges. Guided by this theoretical framework, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of 41 national bioeconomy strategies to provide systematic answers to the question of how well designed the individual national bioeconomy strategies are to ensure the rise of a sustainable bioeconomy.
Highlights
The bioeconomy is based on the idea of applying biological principles and processes in all sectors of the economy and to increasingly replace fossil-based raw materials in the economy with bio-based resources and principles
Our empirical analysis of 41 different national bioeconomy strategies aims to contribute to answering the following three questions: 1. Type of bioeconomy: Which of the four bio-based transformation pathways or combinations of transformation paths are individual countries pursuing in their strategies?
Enabling governance: Which means of governance do countries employ in their political strategies to overcome problems of path dependencies in the development of a sustainable bioeconomy?
Summary
The bioeconomy is based on the idea of applying biological principles and processes in all sectors of the economy and to increasingly replace fossil-based raw materials in the economy with bio-based resources and principles. An innovative and sustainable use of bio-based resources in different sectors of the economy (i.e., a bio-based transformation) provides opportunities for achieving a number of different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have been designed to improve social, economic, and ecological living conditions. This applies to sustainable solutions to current climate change risks [1]. Increasingly demand the development of a comprehensive governance framework for the bioeconomy to ensure the emergence of sustainable bio-based transformations [3,4]. A broader perspective that provides a comparative global overview about national bioeconomy politics is still missing
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