Visions of Sustainability in Bioeconomy Research
By S. F. Pfau, J. Hagens, B. Dankbaar, A. Smits. 2014
354 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The rise of the bioeconomy is usually associated with increased sustainability. However, various controversies suggest doubts about this assumed relationship. The objective of this paper is to identify different visions and the current understanding of the relationship between the bioeconomy and sustainability in the scientific literature by means of a systematic review. After a search in several databases, 87 scientific journal articles were selected for review. Results show that visions about the relationship between bioeconomy and sustainability differ substantially. Four different visions were identified, including: (1) the assumption that sustainability is an inherent characteristic of the bioeconomy; (2) the expectation of benefits under certain conditions; (3) tentative criticism under consideration of potential pitfalls; and (4) the assumption of a negative impact of the bioeconomy on sustainability. There is considerable attention for sustainability in the scientific bioeconomy debate, and the results show that the bioeconomy cannot be considered as self-evidently sustainable. In further research and policy development, good consideration should therefore be given to the question of how the bioeconomy could contribute to a more sustainable future. Furthermore, it is stressed that the bioeconomy should be approached in a more interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary way. The consideration of sustainability may serve as a basis for such an approach.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b8880a7df913a534fc20925c80921844268286d
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
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Citations in the corpus
- Transition Governance towards a Bioeconomy: A Comparison of Finland and The Netherlands (2016, background): “Such fundamental change processes tend to be highly contested [22–26], involve a great number of actors across different domains and will probably take decades to reach a new dynamically stable equilibrium.”
- Pathways to Shape the Bioeconomy (2017, background): “A further option for avoiding land use conflicts is the use of residual and waste materials such as the non-edible parts of food crops, timber and forest residues, agricultural byproducts, and biogenic municipal or industrial waste [20,53].”
- Governance of the Bioeconomy: A Global Comparative Study of National Bioeconomy Strategies (2018, positive): “However, recent studies emphasize the dependence of a sustainable bioeconomy on technical, economic, and social prerequisites that the bioeconomy itself cannot create [2].”
- Bioeconomy Strategies: Contexts, Visions, Guiding Implementation Principles and Resulting Debates (2017, background): “Different understandings of the relationship between the bioeconomy and sustainability were identified in the scientific literature [53]:”
- A Path Transition Towards a Bioeconomy—The Crucial Role of Sustainability (2019, background): “Reference [21]), consumer acceptance of bio-based products struggles with several challenges (for an overview see Reference [90]), but after all, sustainability is the key for purchasing decisions in favour of the bioeconomy.”
- The circular bioeconomy: Its elements and role in European bioeconomy clusters (2020, background): “A strong optimism has been observed regarding the benefits of the bioeconomy (McCormick and Kautto, 2013); some bioeconomy strategies and scientific publications consider the bioeconomy to be inherently sustainable (Hetemäki et al., 2017; Pfau et al., 2014).”
- Towards a Bioeconomy in Europe: National, Regional and Industrial Strategies (2015, background): “[44] argue that it is important that as the bioeconomy develops, the relationship with sustainability is taken into consideration.”
- Leading the way to a European circular bioeconomy strategy (2017, background): “Focusing mostly on Europe, for instance, Priefer et al. (2017), Pfau et al. (2014), Ollikainen (2014) and McCormick and Kautto (2013) identify the existing gaps and needs for incorporating new insights into existing understanding.”
- Forestry in bioeconomy – smart green growth for the humankind (2014, background): “Also, sustainability issues for each biomass type are important and their utilization should be sustainable and consistent with each other (Pfau et al. (2014) demonstrate that the sustainability of bioeconomy is understood in different ways in the literature).”