ABSTRACT
Many European rural regions have identified the bioeconomy as a future pillar of their regional development strategies, enabling them not only to contribute to the achievement of overarching Sustainable Development Goals at national and European levels, but also to unlock new opportunities for regional growth. This focus has led regions to identify the bioeconomy as a potential domain of the Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3). Regional bioeconomy initiatives are envisaged to combine sustainable exploitation of biomass, whether coming from agriculture or forestry, and promotion of new market outlets for bio-based products. By means of this, an internal process of retooling and optimising traditional resource-based activities is combined with an external process of integrating regional actors into new industrial value chains. As an economic process, achieving a transition of the regional bioeconomy refers less to upscaling of the existing commodity export filière, where internationalised actors often dominate the flows in and out of the regional economy, than to a change of scope that considers biomass production as the starting point for engaging in multiple industrial processes. In a nutshell, the transition aims less at retooling the existing production capacity and reinforcing the position of commodity providers in a linear global value chain, than to widen the market opportunities by integrating multiple value chains with future growth potential and to shorten the number of intermediaries between territorial economic agents and global markets.
