Towards effective national and international governance for a sustainable bioeconomy: A global expert perspective

Abstract

In an ideal scenario, the bioeconomy creates technology-based opportunities that promote economic growth and social progress while decoupling these development goals from increasing resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Over the last decade, many countries worldwide have adopted comprehensive bioeconomy strategies. However, little is known about the implementation of these strategies. The following article presents and discusses the results of a survey of 282 global bioeconomy experts conducted in 2020 on behalf of the German Bioeconomy Council. We take stock of the implementation of bioeconomy strategies, identify continued governance gaps that constrain transformative shifts towards a sustainable bioeconomy and determine political support measures to overcome these gaps. Most importantly, our results show that even more intergovernmental cooperation and coordination at the international level is needed to create frameworks for sustainable bioeconomy development.