As part of SusValueWaste’s policy work package, the research paper “Directionality across Diversity: Governing Contending Policy Rationales in the Transition towards the Bioeconomy” was recently published in Sustainability (open access).

The aim of this paper is to get a better understanding of whether, and how, the bioeconomy consists of contending rationales for governance and policy-making. A discourse analysis of submissions to a public hearing on the development of a Norwegian bioeconomy strategy, shows that it is possible to group the responses into (1) a bio-technology vision; (2) a bio-resource vision; and (3) a bio-ecology vision. (These visions were identified in a SusValueWaste research paper published in 2016). Echoing the structure of the Norwegian economy, the policy submissions reveal that the bio-resource vision is the more dominant. The paper also discuss how the opposing visions can cause tensions, which may hinder the course of the ongoing socio-technical transition.

Sustainability is an international, cross-disciplinary, scholarly and open access journal of environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability of human beings. The paper was published online in February 2017, and is part of a Sustainability Special Issue on Innovation and Sustainable Development for the Bioeconomy.