The Economics of the Bioeconomy: A New Version of Good Economics?

• In Event: Regeneration, Promises and Innovation in the Bioeconomy

Abstract

What shall we live off in the future? What will provide jobs, food, opportunities, create new markets and opportunities? What will come after the carbon-economy? What will follow the fossil-era? The last ten-15 years or so, have seen a particular policy-response to that question: After the fossil-economy, comes, will come, must come, another economy, a bioeconomy. The bioeconomy is a new version of the economy, a promissory object, an economy transformed, relying on biological resources, knowledge and technologies to fuel sustainable growth, an economy which we have suggested to call “A Good Economy” (Asdal et. al 2018). But where does this economy come from? Studies of the economy and performativity have shown how economic knowledge has constituted its object “the economy” and contributed to performing economic activities (e.g. Mitchell 2011). So if the bioeconomy is a new, transformed version of the economy, can we trace it back to some new form of economic expertise or economic practices? This paper seeks an answer to this question by tracing how economic research are enrolled in bioeconomy- and their related innovation strategies. We ask how this version of economics are made, how it performs economic subjects and objects, and how it contributes (or not?) to performing a new bioeconomy. Empirically we start from a set of market studies that has been informing Norwegian cod farming innovation strategies. Does economics perform a new version of a ‘good economics’ that is made to take part in the emerging bioeconomy?

Authors

• Kristin Asdal, TIK, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture

• Béatrice Cointe, University of Oslo