To date the concept of the bioeconomy - an economy based primarily on biogenic instead
of fossil resources - has largely been associated with visions of "green growth" and the advancement
of biotechnology and has been framed from within an industrial perspective. However, there is
no consensus as to what a bioeconomy should effectively look like, and what type of society it
would sustain. In this paper, we identify different types of narratives constructed around this
concept and carve out the techno-political implications they convey. We map these narratives
on a two-dimensional option space, which allows for a rough classification of narratives and
their related imaginaries into four paradigmatic quadrants. We draw the narratives from three
different sources: (i) policy documents of national and supra-national authorities; (ii) stakeholder
interviews; and (iii) scenarios built in a biophysical modelling exercise. Our analysis shows that there
is a considerable gap between official policy papers and visions supported by stakeholders. At least
in the case of Austria there is also a gap between the official strategies and the option space identified
through biophysical modelling. These gaps testify to the highly political nature of the concept of the
bioeconomy and the diverging visions of society arising from it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:5683 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Hausknost, Daniel, Schriefl, Ernst, Lauk, Christian, Kalt, Gerald |
| Publisher | MDPI AG |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su9040669, http://www.mdpi.com, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/sections/aspects_of_sustainability, http://epub.wu.ac.at/5683/ |
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