Benjamin Fleischmann, Andreas Mayer, Christoph Görg, Melanie Pichler
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
The bioeconomy seeks to replace fossil fuels with biomass in various products and industrial sectors. The dominant political bioeconomy project focuses on economic growth and aims to increase biomass demand in the EU. This can exacerbate global land use competition and pressures on ecosystems. However, this project does not consider reducing resource use to tackle biophysical limits. Technological innovations are the means for ensuring sustainability. Few social scientific studies have investigated how actors reproduce or question the dominant bioeconomy project. We contribute to this research gap by using critical policy analysis. We explore how actors address biophysical limits and assert their positions and strategies in policy conflicts stemming from the EU bioeconomy strategy. We thereby identified two central conflicts: regulating bio-based plastics and the cascading use of biomass. Our analysis included position papers, policy documents, and expert interviews. We grouped the actors based on their positions and strategies into three political bioeconomy projects. Thus, in addition to the dominant growth-oriented project, we identified a circular and sufficiency-oriented one. Our analysis indicates that these alternative projects influenced bio-based plastics and bioenergy policies to acknowledge biophysical limits. EU policy even provides measures to reduce plastic use. Nevertheless, the Renewable Energy Directive's approach to cascading use reflects a compromise with the growth-oriented project that might not cap using primary biomass for energy. Overall, we demonstrate that there are potential alliances in promoting alternatives to the dominant bioeconomy project. Setting clear limits is constrained by powerful interests advocating for a growth-oriented bioeconomy.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-024-01543-0.
期刊介绍：
The journal Sustainability Science offers insights into interactions within and between nature and the rest of human society, and the complex mechanisms that sustain both. The journal promotes science based predictions and impact assessments of global change, and seeks ways to ensure that such knowledge can be understood by society and be used to strengthen the resilience of global natural systems (such as ecosystems, ocean and atmospheric systems, nutrient cycles), social systems (economies, governments, industry) and human systems at the individual level (lifestyles, health, security, and human values).
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