Exploring new visions for a sustainable bioeconomy

Abstract

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.