Fragmented governance and policymaking
Sectors of the bioeconomy are varied and amorphous. A myriad of actors across institutional and social settings are involved, with no single actor holding the power to steer the transition alone.
This introduces challenges for how to design and target effective policies. While bioeconomy strategies are emerging, there is currently limited international policy harmonization and coordination. Broadly there is a lack of coherent public policy measures such as clear investment plans, coordinated delivery agencies and monitoring.
Nationally
Within national governments, sometimes even different ministries are pursuing divergent goals depending on their mandate.
Explicit and outcome-oriented integration of broader societal goals into bioeconomy strategies, and vice versa, remains limited or only at the initial stages. Strategies tend to be developed in isolation from each other, with each belonging to a different branch of government and holding its own distinct set of objectives. For example, the current bioeconomy debate taking place in Brazil has various ministries leading the discussion from different perspectives, focusing on different outcomes with impacts for different industry sectors.
Internationally
There is a lack of a unified global framework for governing bioeconomies, which hampers effective decision-making over the international impacts of a transition from fossil fuel-based economies to bio-based economies. Currently, regulation is mainly country-specific and aligned with each national development pathway and strategy. This creates numerous overlapping institutional arrangements for the global governance of bioeconomies – coupled with a lack of binding international laws and regulations – and does not provide mechanisms for both funding and capacity transfer.
There is a lack of a unified global framework for governing bioeconomies, which hampers effective decision-making over the international impacts of a transition from fossil fuel-based economies to bio-based economies.
In the absence of an appetite for international cooperation, there are some emerging factors that could enable governments to better join up policies that affect the bioeconomy. These include the mutual benefits of trade in bio-based feedstocks and products, the possibility of accelerated innovation development through research partnerships, and an international understanding – based on the link between zoonotic diseases and nature degradation, demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic – that global collaboration can be mutually beneficial. These themes are explored in Chapter 5.
Fragmented innovation systems
A horizon scan conducted by the authors identified a diverse range of potential bio-based applications that could significantly affect current production and consumption models. Whether in a positive or negative way depends on when, how and where they are taken up. The diversity reflects the heterogeneity of international bioeconomies and demonstrates the importance of more joined-up development approaches.
The horizon scan found a concentration of visible innovations in new processes, such as fermentation advances and diversification of feedstocks for, and products from, biorefineries.
Many of the more transformative innovations are only enabled when rolled-out in combination with other new advances. For example, there are critical linchpin technologies required for numerous bioeconomy innovations, such as carbon capture and utilization and the harnessing of hydrogen, which would help in implementing innovations like protein from air.
There are many ways that innovations could be adopted simultaneously – for example, at different stages of the value chain, as well as part of an industrial cluster, like integrating carbon capture storage within a biorefinery.
Critically, many identified innovations are technologically possible but not yet commercially viable. Even mature bio-based applications or technologies can lack market readiness or market opportunities due to the low cost of fossil fuel-based alternatives, as demonstrated by the struggle of bioplastics to compete with traditional plastics. This presents significant problems for investment and scaling.
Another area to consider is the landscapes on which many land-intensive technologies depend. Parcels of land provide opportunities to deliver multiple societal and environmental functions – through nature-based solutions. For example, through innovative management practices, like polyculture planting, mosaic forestry or agroforestry.
More importantly, because there are no ‘silver bullet’ bioeconomy innovations, but rather a suite of useful interventions, strategic decisions need to be made about national industrial policy – such as where the innovation should be and who is trained to work with it – and how it is aligned with landscape policy (e.g. how is the feedstock integrated with cattle schemes and how does it align with plans for conservation set-aside policies).
This is because if innovations are supported on a case-by-case basis, some of the benefits, trade-offs or negative consequences that might occur once innovations are implemented at scale simultaneously may not be known about. This is the case, for example, when planning a landscape policy to grow feedstock for a particular bio-based product, without considering the land spared or used by other bio-based innovations.
