Policy dialogues on Bioeconomy for Sustainable Development: value creation, pathways and governance

Research Project, 2018 – 2020

The bioeconomy offers new development opportunities for countries and regions across a wide range of income levels and resource endowments. There is wide agreement on the importance of realising a sustainable bioeconomy but there is less agreement as to which pathways are preferred. We propose here a series of dialogues on the bioeconomy that focus on its broader development potential rather than its fulfilment of specific goals such as climate stabilisation or sustainable land use. This broader development potential begins with creation of new value through bio-based products and processes and is fuelled by harnessing traditional and modern knowledge alongside innovative technologies, socio-economic institutions and resource management systems. The dialogues are aimed at implementing a stakeholder process for comparing and contrasting a set of identified bioeconomy pathways across basic indicators of sustainability and well-being. The realisation of the different pathways will also require an array of social, political and economic governance mechanisms. By carrying out five different dialogues in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, we aim to identify some key barriers and enablers for the bioeconomy around the world, while also facilitating comparisons across different levels of income and different social and political contexts. The expected result is a deeper understanding of how advances in the bioeconomy are connected across different levels from local to national to global, as well as a sense for how bio-based resources can find new applications and how sustainable landscapes can be cultivated. A set of policy briefs and recommendations will be published for each of the five dialogues and a synthesis article will be published covering the comparisons across all five sets of results.