The Bioeconomy: Institutions, Innovation and Sustainability

177 Pages·2023·6.016 MB·English

by  Nicolas Befort

The Bioeconomy

The bioeconomy is steadily becoming more important in regional, national and
European public policies. As it encompasses the transformation of agricultural,
marine and organic resources into food, feed, fuels, energy and materials, the
bioeconomy should become a major new industry, outlining the possibility of a
post-fossil future. This book is the first attempt to depict the origins, formation and
challenges of this new industry in terms of emerging institutions, innovation and
economic strategies. The result of this work is that the substitution of raw materials
alone is not enough to get out of the fossil economy.
This book develops a political economy of the ecological transition which theo­
rizes the transition as a new crisis of capitalism. This phase is characterized by stake­
holders’ attempts to develop renewed rationales and strategies to take control of the
reorganization of flows of natural resources, their outcomes and their evaluation.
The proposed framework considers recent results in four complementary research
strands: transition studies, institutional economics, ecological economics and the
evolutionary economics of innovation.
The book will be of interest to researchers interested in the development of
the bioeconomy, and both researchers and students seeking to understand the
role of heterodox economics in the ecological transition.
Nicolas Befort is Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Chair in
Bioeconomy and Sustainable Development, NEOMA Business School, France.
He is also Associated Research Fellow to LISIS (INRAE, CNRS, University
Gustave Eiffel).
Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics
Anarchism and Ecological Economics
A Political Platform for Ecological Economics
Ove Daniel Jakobsen
Water Resources and Economic Processes
Edited by Tiziano Distefano
The Degrowth Alternative
A Path to Address our Environmental Crisis?
Diana Stuart, Ryan Gunderson and Brian Petersen
A History of Ecological Economic Thought
Marco P. Vianna Franco and Antoine Missemer
Radical Ecological Economics and Accounting to Save the Planet
The Failure of Mainstream Economists
Jacques Richard
Economics, Ecology and Policy for the Bioeconomy
A Holistic Approach
Sanja Tišma, Anamarija Farkaš, Anamarija Pisarovi´c, Marina Funduk, and Iva Toli´c
The Informal Sector and the Environment
Edited by Ranjula Bali Swain and Uma Kambhampati
The Bioeconomy
Institutions, Innovation and Sustainability
Nicolas Befort
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge­
Studies-in-Ecological-Economics/book-series/RSEE
The Bioeconomy
Institutions, Innovation and Sustainability
Nicolas Befort
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Nicolas Befort
The right of Nicolas Befort to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-61040-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-61041-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-10301-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003103011
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of figures vi

List of tables vii

Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction 1

2 A political economy of the ecological transition towards a post-

fossil economy 17

3 From the development of industrial chemistry to the emergence of

the bioeconomy 42

4 The institutional architecture of the bioeconomy 52

5 Alliance-driven governance and the relationship of firms to

territories in the bioeconomy 77

6 Product development in the bioeconomy, the case of lactic acid

and PLA 95

7 The case of the two other “small molecules”: succinic acid and

levulinic acid 109

Conclusion: post-fossil economy and transition: making the
future happen today 141

Index 160
Figures

1.1 Annual emissions from fossil fuels, by world region 2

2.1 A stylized representation of early promises cycles 32

5.1 Constraints on the firms of the bioeconomy to develop new

projects 78

6.1 The PLA techno-economic promises cycle 103

7.1 Steps in the production of PBS 111

7.2 The economic model of the value chain developed around

bio-based succinic acid 111

7.3 Succinic acid die segment held by Myriant 125

7.4 The techno-economic promises of succinic acid 129

7.5 The techno-economic promises cycle of levulinic acid 136

8.1 The evolution of the relationship between agriculture and

petrochemistry 145

8.2 A static representation of the intertwining fields creating the

bioeconomy 146

8.3 The actors projecting themselves into different economic worlds,

based on multi-level representations of their collective action

space 153
Tables

4.1 The five commodity chain economic models supported by the

PPP 59

4.2 Projected funds for each of the MEFs 61

4.3 The different types of diversity in the plant/crop-based renewable

resources 2020 (developed by author) 68

5.1 The positioning of firms in the bioeconomy according to their

alliances 89

6.1 Learning in the hype cycle 105

7.1 The trajectory of patents cited in the 1990 Biofine patent 132
Acknowledgements

The realization of this book was made possible by the Chair in Bioeconomy
and Sustainable Development of NEOMA Business School (funded by NEOMA
Business School, Greater Reims, the Paris-Reims Foundation, the Marne-en-
Champagne Chamber of Commerce and the Caisse d’Epargne Grand Est Europe)
and the “Young Researcher” (2017–2018) and “High Level Researcher” Grants
(2020–2021) of the Greater East Region. Thanks to Sophie Raynaud for the
assistance in the realization of the illustrations.
I thank Morgane for her unwavering support. This book is dedicated to her.
1 Introduction
1. Getting out of the fossil economy
Since the advent of Fordism after World War II, social movements have stood
against the development of productivism, warning of the risks to biodiversity
and the environment entailed by this mode of production. Just as the Club of
Rome report pointed out in 1972 that the dynamics of the extraction of nat­
ural resources observed at the time were not sustainable, all the IPCC reports
indicate an increase in greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change
(Meadows and Club of Rome, 1972). The IPCC reports also expose the
anthropic responsibility regarding climate change (IPCC, 2022). This idea of
anthropic responsibility is expressed by the notion of the Anthropocene (Sar­
razin and Lecomte, 2016). Humanity has now become a geological force, as
shown by the layers of material formed by our waste. The merit of this notion
is that it anchors the debate on climate change in the relationship that
humanity has with nature. Nevertheless, there have been criticisms of this
vision (Banerjee and Arjaliès, 2021; Malm, 2016).
From the point of view of political economy, the notion of the Anthro­
pocene is problematic for two reasons. On the one hand, it tends to consider
humanity as a homogeneous whole, denying both the conflicts generated by
the appropriation of capital and the colonial past of Western countries. On the
other hand, Malm bases his concept of the Capitalocene on the concept of the
“fossil economy”. According to Malm (2016), the fossil economy is rooted in
the development of the steam engine associated with the development of the
use of coal, which has structured this mode of production. The latter, unstable
by nature, is oriented by its expansion based on the increasing consumption of
fossil resources at the origin of greenhouse gas emissions. It is interesting to
note with Figure 1.1 that the CO emissions relating to fossil fuels were
2
reported around 1770 and experienced a significant increase in 1900 and then a
very strong increase from 1950. As this book will show, these three dates are
not insignificant. Indeed, the turning point of 1770 illustrates the thesis of the
emergence of the fossil economy as a choice guided by the interests of the
British, French and American ruling classes (and other Western countries).
Thus, extraction and increasing combustion are the result of the search for the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003103011-1