Policy Design for Resilience? Bioeconomy policy design and the maize bio-based production system in Italy

Over the past two decades, more than fifty countries worldwide have published bioeconomy-related policies to facilitate the transition from a fossil-based to a bio-based economy in response to resource depletion, environmental degradation, and climate change. However, this transition is likely to increase already high societal demands on bio-based production systems and exacerbate social, environmental, and economic challenges, making the resilience of bio-based production systems an issue of public policy. This paper examines the case study of the Italian bioeconomy, analyzing the maize bio-based production system in Italy. The paper considers the three dimensions of resilience (robustness, adaptability and transformability) and examines to what extent the policy mix enables or constrains them. The analysis is based on the Resilience Policy Design Framework and the methods include a content analysis of relevant agricultural and bioeconomy-related policy documents and semi-structured expert interviews. The paper underlines diverging resilience orientations within the policy mix. It shows that agricultural policies are mainly oriented towards robustness, while nominal bioeconomy policies prioritise transformability.