Understanding the bioeconomy through its instruments: standardizing sustainability, neoliberalizing bioeconomies?

Abstract

Sustainability standards have been one of the hopefuls for decades when it comes to ensuring the sustainability of biomass for the bioeconomy, especially in the wake of their evolvement from voluntary, non-governmental to hybrid, public–private governance instruments in recent years. In addition to doubts regarding their legitimacy and effectiveness, however, they have also been associated with a neoliberalization of nature that integrates natural resources into a free market logic. Drawing on a conceptual framework that builds on political ecology and the political sociology of policy instruments, this paper challenges this notion. To this end, it examines sustainability standards in three countries/regions particularly prominent for the bioeconomy—the EU, Brazil, and Indonesia—to illustrate how these can be differentiated in terms of their neoliberal orientation, and what can be inferred from this for the orientation and state of the respective bioeconomies. The results show that the introduction of sustainability standards is not necessarily accompanied by a neoliberalization of nature. Rather, it is shown that the standards and their specific designs—and thus also their intrinsic understanding of sustainability as integration—are primarily intended to serve the material interests of the state and the respective industrial factions, for which neoliberal configurations are sometimes seen as rather obstructive, sometimes as rather useful. The sustainability standards, and thus the bioeconomies for which they stand, therefore, rather serve as instruments to stay on the path of modernization and industrial development already taken or envisaged, or, put differently, as strategies to avoid social–ecological transformation.

A global analysis of bioeconomy visions in governmental bioeconomy strategies

“…The relative importance of economic versus environmental goals has been a central focus for social scientists studying bioeconomy discourses. The strong emphasis on economic goals is consistent with previous research that has described the dominance of economic considerations in bioeconomy policymaking (Hausknost et al 2017 ; Meyer 2017 ; Böcher et al 2020 ; D’Amato et al 2020 ; Sanz-Hernández et al 2020 ; Vogelpohl and Töller 2021 ; Eversberg et al 2023 ; Vogelpohl 2023 ). The main reason for this relative dominance can likely be traced back to the initial motivation behind the creation and promotion of the bioeconomy in its current dominant ‘promissory’ framing in the late 1990s and 2000s (Eversberg et al 2023 ).…”

The more things change, the more they stay the same: promises of bioeconomy and the economy of promises

“…Yet, as Vogelpohl's (2023) contribution argues, such critical analysis should not legitimize wholesale characterizations of bioeconomy policies as 'neoliberal'. Scrutinizing sustainability standards in the European Union, Brazil and Indonesia from a political ecology and political sociology perspective, he shows that those policies are strongly shaped by the respective countries' or regions' economic situation and the material interests associated with it.…”

From hegemony-reinforcing to hegemony-transcending transformations: horizons of possibility and strategies of escape

“…Thus far, such approaches have been by far the most widely embraced and operationalized within the international and EU environmental policy spaces, including the bioeconomy policy domain (Eversberg et al 2022;Ramcilovik-Suominen et al 2022;Vogelpohl 2023). Whilst there is a diversity of approaches associated with eco-modernism, market-based and socio-technical solutions, a substantial body of literature asserts that such proposals based on ecomodernism perpetuate the same old hegemonic approaches to global governance with minor, incremental, or aesthetic changes (Feola 2015;Holmgren et al 2022;Vogelphl 2023).…”