The Politics for a Fairer Bioeconomy

Abstract

Bioeconomies are yet to meet their sustainable development potentials. Thus far, mostly unsustainable production has prevailed, due to reasons on four different levels. First, domestic regulatory and economic incentives have favored conventional, input-intensive monocultures and big agribusiness-controlled systems. Second, some norms have been crucial in underlying those policies: (i) the economic but not political inclusion of smallholders and low-income countries; (ii) the pre-eminence of climate and wild biodiversity conservation over other sustainability issues, assuming "renewable" to mean "sustainable" and disregarding the performance of bio-based production on other social and environmental criteria; and (iii) an implicit urban bias that limits rural development strategies and prioritizes the provision of resources to cities. Third, state and private agroindustry agents who espouse those norms have formed winning coalitions to concretize policy beliefs held in common. Ultimately, there are feedback loops between agency, governance architectures, and allocation and access patterns. Therefore, the prevailing production patterns' very distributive outcomes can be identified as a cause underlying their dominance. As such, social equity reveals to be not just a normative goal but also a key determinant of governance. To not aggravate inequalities and be more sustainable , bioeconomy promotion needs policies that reconfigure allocation patterns and promote structural change.