Bioeconomic Solutions for Sustainability? Institutions and Political Conflicts as Important Driving Forces for Bioeconomy Policy

The contribution deals with the role of the bioeconomy in achieving the sustainability goals from a political science perspective. The bioeconomy plays a key role, for example, for the European Green Deal and the achievement of EU climate neutrality by 2050. In Germany, too, the National Bioeconomy Strategy is intended to make an important contribution to climate protection through bioeconomic solutions. In addition, more than 50 countries around the world have now adopted their own bioeconomy strategies. Based on research on German and EU bioeconomy policy, this contribution shows that these programmatic goals are in contradiction to actual policy. On the one hand, there is no coordinated, integrated bioeconomy policy at all; on the other hand, institutional paths and actor conflicts shape the practical implementation of concrete bioeconomy solutions. On the one hand, conflicts emerge between economy and ecology that has long been observed in environmental policy. On the other hand, however, new conflicts arise when actors demand access to biomass that was previously reserved for more traditional sectors such as forestry, due to novel technical solutions such as biosourced chemicals. This is illustrated by concrete examples from the fields of bioenergy, bioplastics and, more generally, the wood-based bioeconomy.