Regeneration, Promises and Innovation in the Bioeconomy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest, both in STS and policy circles, in the so-called bioeconomy: an economy that would rely on biological resources, knowledge and technologies to fuel sustained and sustainable growth. The bioeconomy prompts us to reconsider the relations between economic and biological life and, more broadly, the articulation of politics, economic growth, science and nature. Indeed, it enacts a specific vision of this articulation: the promise of an economy that is at the same time innovative, transformative, regenerative, sustainable, responsible and environmentally friendly.
Policy and academic notions capturing such attempts at imagining and engineering economies that would grow within environmental limits and make good use of innovation abound: e.g. sustainable development, green growth, blue economy… Despite a wealth of conceptual propositions to make sense of these attempts, few detailed empirical studies so far have explicitly engaged with this conceptual work. How can we open up these promissory economies and trace the relations that constitute them?
This session will present empirically and conceptually grounded contributions that interrogate the transformations in the way the economy relates to nature but also politics.

Individual Presentations

• Asset to Zero Waste: Innovation, Science and Technology for Circular Waste Bioeconomics - Nitha Palakshappa, Massey University; Sita Venkateswar, Massey University

• The Economics of the Bioeconomy: A New Version of Good Economics? - Kristin Asdal, TIK, Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture; Béatrice Cointe, University of Oslo

• Unicorn Meat and the Bioeconomy of Future Food - Richard Lane, Utrecht University; Mark H Cooper, University of California, Davis

• Designing Sustainability: The Limits of Technospatial Growth Imaginaries - Duygu Kasdogan, İzmir Katip Çelebi Üniversitesi

Session Organizers

• Béatrice Cointe, University of Oslo

• Pierre Delvenne, Université de Liège (SPIRAL)

• Kean Birch, York University

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