Explaining Weak Salience of Resilience Challenges in Bioeconomy Strategies: A Cross Regional Comparative Analysis

Over the last two decades, over 50 countries have promulgated holistic strategies to promote their transformations towards a bioeconomy. While motivated to foster economic development and solve the sustainability challenges of the fossil-based economy, these strategies do little in discussing the resilience challenges of bioeconomies and the bio-based production systems on which they rest. In particular, the environmental short- and long-term stresses that are likely to threaten the continued delivery of the desired functions of the bioeconomy and its production systems are barely addressed. This paper aims to understand why the salience of such resilience challenges is so low in bioeconomy strategies. To that end, we employ a qualitative most-different systems design analysis to compare and trace the bioeconomy policy design processes of six countries – Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Our analysis shows that key common factors to explaining the low salience of resilience challenges are the dominant economic problematization of bioeconomy strategies and the limited inclusion of environmental actors and interest groups in the policy design process. Additionally, the paper highlights the missing establishment of the concept of resilience as a policy making criterion. Based on our empirical findings, we argue that co-design by environmental actors is an essential element of capable bioeconomy policy design spaces and consider it a key policy recommendation towards the development of resilient bioeconomies.