What can the bioeconomy contribute to the achievement of higher degrees of sustainability? From substitution to structural change to transformation

Andreas Pyka, Stephanie Lang and Ezgi Ari

Chapter 10 in Handbook on the Bioeconomy, 2025, pp 197-215 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Achieving higher degrees of sustainability requires paradigmatic changes in production and consumption patterns, policy, culture, and institutions, thus necessitating a fundamental socioeconomic transformation. A successful shift from a petroleum-based economy to a bioeconomy will play an outstanding role in this transformation. The emergence of the bioeconomy needs to be perceived as a co-evolutionary process. As a bioeconomy is not automatically sustainable, the transition requires a dedicated innovation systems approach to steer the overcoming of the carbon lock-in, accompanied by complex dynamics between changing production structures and changing lifestyles. A simple scaling-up and substitution process of bioeconomy technologies, which prevails in the view of standard mainstream economics, will not be sufficient. Exploring the transformation requires adopting ideas from evolutionary and complexity economics in order to examine how economic developments can be pushed onto a green growth trajectory based on emerging new and encompassing value creation networks.

Keywords: Bioeconomy; Dedicated innovation system; Transformation; Evolutionary economics; Complexity economics; Dedicated knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800373488
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