From pro-growth and planetary limits to degrowth and decoloniality: An emerging bioeconomy policy and research agenda

In 2012, the European Commission (EC) introduced the new bio-based economy or bioeconomy policy project, since adopted by about 50 countries. Alongside politicians, various research and other interest groups have promoted the bioeconomy as inevitable, apolitical, and a triple-win strategy for nature, people, and the economy. Recently, bioeconomy is also actively promoted and framed as transformative. Yet what is transformative or even new in the EU bioeconomy policy, and why is it important to critically engage with the concept of bioeconomy, especially but not only in the so-called Global South? To address these questions, we revisit the discursive field of the bioeconomy, outlining two dominant yet opposed visions that focus on economic growth and planetary limits respectively. We term them ‘pro-economic growth’ and ‘pro-planetary limits’ bioeconomy visions. Drawing on the literature and our own empirical research in market-based, ‘green’, ‘climate friendly’, and ‘bio-based’ economy policy approaches and initiatives, we highlight the EU bioeconomy's embeddedness in colonial and neocolonial logics of domination and green extractivism. While our examples are drawn from the Global South they connect and resonate with the wider European bioeconomy project. We argue that the existing EU bioeconomy visions are poorly suited to address multidimensional and intertwined existential and civilisational challenges, including overconsumption, extractivism, and global socioecological inequalities and injustices. Employing the decolonial environmental justice, feminist political ecology and degrowth literature we outline the missing narratives, ideas and logics and their potentials for fundamental and systemic change in and beyond the bioeconomy project. Finally, we highlight gaps in policy and research that warrant further attention, including: self-reflexivity in identifying policy problems and solutions; historical contextualisation of the EU's role in global environmental governance; silencing and (mis)representation; and reprioritisation of multiple existences and life-supporting practices, together with the relevant epistemologies and ontologies that support them.Peer reviewe

Is the EU shirking responsibility for its deforestation footprint in tropical countries? Power, material, and epistemic inequalities in the EU’s global environmental governance

This paper critically examines the European Union’s (EU) role in tropical deforestation and the bloc’s actions to mitigate it. We focus on two EU policy communications aimed at the challenge: stepping up EU action to protect and restore the world's forests and the EU updated bioeconomy strategy. In addition, we refer to the European Green Deal, which articulates the bloc’s overarching vision for sustainability and transformations. We find that by casting deforestation as a production problem and a governance challenge on the supply side, these policies deflect attention from some of the key drivers of tropical deforestation—the EU’s overconsumption of deforestation-related commodities and asymmetric market and trade power relations. The diversion allows the EU unfettered access to agro-commodities and biofuels, which are important inputs to the EU’s green transition and bio-based economy. Upholding a ‘sustainability image’ within the EU, an overly business-as-usual approach has taken precedence over transformative policies, enabling multinational corporations to run an ecocide treadmill, rapidly obliterating tropical forests. Whereas the EU's plan to nurture a bioeconomy and promote responsible agro-commodities production in the global South are relevant, the bloc is evasive in setting firm targets and policy measures to overcome the inequalities that spring from and enable its overconsumption of deforestation-related commodities. Drawing on degrowth and decolonial theories, we problematise the EU’s anti-deforestation policies and highlight alternative ideas that could lead to more just, equitable and effective measures for confronting the tropical deforestation conundrum

From hegemony-reinforcing to hegemony-transcending transformations: horizons of possibility and strategies of escape

In the face of ever escalating global socioecological crises, the necessity of radical systemic transformations has gained increasing political and academic traction over the last decade, among others in the context of ‘green’ and bio-based economies. We draw on the works of political philosophers Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Judith Butler to develop a typology of transformational dynamics. In this typology, the word transformation implies political agendas, processes and outcomes that involve the total structural reordering of a social field, which we juxtapose with ‘inclusion’, which implies cases in which pre-existing logics are further entrenched or extended. Drawing on the theoretical framework of hegemony, inclusions and transformations, we develop an analytical lens that focuses on the relations between hegemony and transformative dynamics. This analytical lens is developed and exemplified by discussing the transformative potentials of multiple socioecological and political agendas, including those associated with eco-modernism, Marxism, decoloniality, eco-feminism, degrowth and eco-anarchism. Depending on the transformative dynamics in relation to hegemony and the dominant political logics, we distinguish between hegemony-reinforcing, hegemony-replacing, and hegemony-transcending transformations. The provided lens and the typologies of transformations should be useful to those seeking to conceptualize, differentiate, analyse, and tactically strategize the realization of an array of socio-ecological agendas

Exploring new visions for a sustainable bioeconomy

The Bioeconomy is both an enabler and an end for the European Green Deal transformation: achieving the EGD transformation entails transforming the very meaning of sustainable bioeconomy. Among the deepest and most effective leverage points to transform a system are the worldviews driving our behaviours: they yield an enormous power to influence the framings which determine the solution space we explore. Transforming the bioeconomy, thus, requires reflecting on the stories we tell about ourselves, our place in nature, and our relationship with others. Scholars have highlighted how narratives surrounding the EU Bioeconomy have predominantly embraced a “Green Growth” perspective, centred around economic growth, technological innovation, and anthropocentric values, largely ignoring the social and justice dimensions, as well as not questioning the role, relations, and responsibilities of humans in the web of life. These dominant framings are increasingly contested, though, because they have failed to produce the social and ecological outcomes desired. This report introduces perspectives which have been under-represented in the Bioeconomy discourse and integrates them into an alternative vision for a “green, just and sufficient bioeconomy”. This vision places environmental sustainability and social equity at its core, regardless of economic growth; has an inclusive and participatory perspective; care, respect, and reciprocity for and with other humans and non-humans are core values; technology is important to deliver on the green and just objectives, but ethical considerations for new technologies are openly debated

Tackling Conflicts, Supporting Livelihoods: Convivial Conservation in the Campo Ma'an National Park

While most of the literature on park management and nature conservation has focused on the negative implications for local people’s livelihoods, fewer studies have empirically analysed local people’s strategies in responding to these policies and renegotiating their position to continue their traditional livelihoods using their traditional knowledge and legal systems. This study contributes to the current literature on nature conservation by focusing on the impacts of nationally and internationally driven nature conservation policies on indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) and collective strategies and responses to such policies and initiatives to continue their livelihood and cultural practices. We employ a qualitative research approach, using the convivial conservation theoretical lens to analyse the data collected. We conclude that conservation policies have worsened existing livelihoods and constrained the improvement of indigenous people’s livelihoods and local communities. Yet, IPLCs have devised coping mechanisms to deal with the negative effects of these conservation interventions, which include resistance to some conservation policies, agricultural intensification, and involvement in commercial activities. We argue that the convivial conservation approach may offer viable solutions to existing conflicts by promoting human and non-human coexistence, based on indigenous and local people’s knowledge and practices

The more things change, the more they stay the same: promises of bioeconomy and the economy of promises

This editorial lays out the core themes of the special feature and provides an overview of the contributions. It introduces the main argument, namely that the promises of far-reaching change made by recent bioeconomy policies are in fact strategically directed at avoiding transformative change to existing societal arrangements. Bioeconomy discourse showcases technological solutions purported to solve sustainability ‘problems’ while sustaining economic growth, but avoids issues of scalability, integration or negative consequences. Thus, bioeconomy policies, and particularly the latest versions of the predominantly European ‘bio-resource’ variety that have rhetorically integrated a lot of previous sustainability-minded criticism, serve to ward off or delay challenges to an unsustainable status quo, in effect prolongating the escalatory imperatives of capitalist modernity that are at the root of current crises. The editorial’s second part highlights the contributions that the 13 featured articles, based on theoretical considerations as well as policy analyses and empirical case studies from a range of countries, make to this arg

Exploring new visions for a sustainable bioeconomy

The Bioeconomy is both an enabler and an end for the European Green Deal transformation: achieving the EGD transformation entails transforming the very meaning of sustainable bioeconomy. Among the deepest and most effective leverage points to transform a system are the worldviews driving our behaviours: they yield an enormous power to influence the framings which determine the solution space we explore. Transforming the bioeconomy, thus, requiresreflecting on the stories we tell about ourselves, our place in nature, and our relationship with others. Scholars have highlighted how narratives surrounding the EU Bioeconomy have predominantly embraced a “Green Growth” perspective, centred around economic growth, technological innovation, and anthropocentric values, largely ignoring the social and justice dimensions, as well as not questioning the role, relations, and responsibilities of humans in the web of life. These dominant framings are increasingly contested, though, because they have failed to produce the social and ecological outcomes desired. This report introduces perspectives which have been under-represented in the Bioeconomy discourse and integrates them into an alternative vision for a “green, just and sufficient bioeconomy”. This vision places environmental sustainability and social equity at its core, regardless of economic growth; has an inclusive and participatory perspective; care, respect, and reciprocity for and with other humans and non-humans are core values; technology is important to deliver on the green and just objectives, but ethical considerations for new technologies are openly debated

Synergies among social safeguards in FLEGT and REDD+ in Cameroon

Synergies among social safeguards in FLEGT and REDD plus in CameroonPeer reviewe

Introduction to bio-based materials and biotechnologies for eco-efficient construction

This chapter introduces some sustainability challenges, as well as the importance of resource efficiency and the European bioeconomy strategy. The importance of biobased materials and biotech admixtures for eco-efficient construction is summarized. The importance of changing the curriculum of civil engineering to address sustainability challenges and also enhance the collaboration between civil engineers and biotech experts is briefly discussed. Comments concerning the biobased and biotech related publication intensity of several well know civil engineering departments are also made. An outline of the book is also given

Using Risk Assessment as Part of a Systems Approach to the Control and Prevention of HPAIV H5N1

Since its emergence in China in 1996, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus subtype H5N1 has spread across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Countries had to promptly implement control and prevention measures. Numerous research and capacity building initiatives were conducted in the affected regions to improve the capacity of national animal health services to support the development of risk-based mitigation strategies. This paper reviews and discusses risk assessments initiated in several South-East Asian and African countries under one of these projects. Despite important data gaps, the risk assessment results improved the ability of policy makers to design appropriate risk management policies. Disease risk was strongly influenced by various human behavioral factors. The ongoing circulation of HPAIV H5N1 in several Asian countries and in Egypt, despite major disease control efforts, supports the need for an interdisciplinary approach to development of tailored risk management policies, in accordance with the EcoHealth paradigm and the broad concept of risk governance. In particular, active stakeholders engagement and integration of economic and social studies into the policy making process are needed to optimize compliance and sustainable behavioral changes, thereby increasing the effectiveness of mitigation strategies