Neoliberal Bioeconomies? Co-constructing Markets and Natures

Abstract

AbstractThe bioeconomy is a key low-carbon transition pathway to address climate change promoted by a range of policymakers. The bioeconomy has been defined as a market-based strategy for dealing with environmental problems, largely because it seeks to insert bio-based products, fuels, and materials into prevailing economic infrastructures and institutions, rather than challenging underlying capitalist logics. As such, it can be seen as a ‘neoliberal’ response to climate change that reflects theoretical debates about the neoliberalization of nature. Such criticism, however, tends to treat markets as aberrations of nature and disrupting notions of a pristine, untouched natural state. In contrast, I argue that analysing the bioeconomy reveals the co-construction of markets and natures, rather than the imposition of markets on natures. Opening up criticism helps to provide an understanding of how else the bioeconomy could be organized and of the sorts of socio-material arrangements that we view as supportable.