Shaping the bioeconomy: Public and private sector perceptions across European regions

Abstract

The bioeconomy is widely viewed as a viable solution to complex global challenges and diverse actors must collaborate to create sustainable and resilient economies. The public and private sector drive this transformation through strategies, policies, and regulation business choices and investments, innovation and market implementation respectively.

The present study explores perceptions of the bioeconomy among public and private sector actors in nine European regions through the prism of their familiarity and understanding of its constituent parts: concepts, value chains, benefits and risks. The novelty of the research consists in assessing the understanding of the bioeconomy at regional level. Instead of imposing a conventional top-down agenda, it seeks to elicit practitioner conceptualisations, based on 534 survey responses conducted in the respective regional languages. Descriptive and summary statistics were used to explore the data, followed by non-parametric tests.

Key findings are: (1) A positive discourse on the bioeconomy is observed, particularly among survey respondents with high self-rated familiarity, but this may not align with its factual drawbacks. (2) Practical bioeconomy implementation is complex. Environmental benefits are perceived as its most distinguishing feature, yet respondents also consider socioeconomic elements important. Similarly, tensions are observed between personal risks versus societal benefits. Therefore, a sustainable bioeconomy must reconcile environmental and socioeconomic objectives, and different levels of impact. (3) Despite an emerging consensus on the bioeconomy's constituent elements, sector-specific focus areas and regional specificity of conditions prevent uniformity of the bioeconomy across regions. This should be taken into account in policy formulation.