‘Having a structuring effect on Europe’. The Innovative Medicines Initiative and the Construction of the European Health Bioeconomy

• In Event: Bioeconomies - Life, Technologies, and Capital in the 21st Century I: Frictions, Values and Prospective Markets Across Global Bioeoconomies

Abstract

Building on arguments advanced within constructivist research in the social sciences, this paper moves beyond the formal institutional structures of the EU and accounts for the mise en politique of the technosciences as a strategic site for the formation and (attempted) legitimization of a distinctively European identity. In particular, the paper probes how the intertwinement of biotechnology and capital that goes under the rubric of the ‘bioeconomy’ is increasingly being recruited to frame the basic elements of the European supranational order in–the–making. Unsurprisingly for a political entity that proclaims its embrace of a knowledge–driven economy, the promissory expectations revolving around the bioeconomy have played a significant role in performing political and institutional reconfigurations throughout the continent. How, and to what effect, is what we aim to lay bare by specifically focusing on the revealing case study of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the world’s largest public–private partnership (henceforth: PPP) in the life sciences, and a mainstay of the European health bioeconomy sector.
The paper is composed of three parts. First, we tease out different relevant strands within European public discourse that have propelled the construction of supranational imaginaries, and highlight the important role played therein by EU engagement with bioscientific research and innovation. Next, we introduce the European discourse on the bioeconomy, with specific regard to the biopharmaceutical sector, and expound its key tenets. Finally, we probe the latter through a case study-based analysis of IMI.

Author

• Luca Marelli, IEO