Bio-Efficiency: On the valorisation of innovation in the bioeconomy

Abstract

This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the form of public– private partnerships. Yet where literature on the bioeconomy scrutinizes innovation, the concrete link between funders and funded has seldom been subject to focused analytical inquiry. This link is essential to the structure of the bioeconomy project. To broach the arrangements by which efforts to conjure a (bio-)economy underwrite specific patterns of value distribution, this article asks: Which discursive and conceptual resources are deployed to define the worth by which projects are construed as worthy of funding? Drawing on online ethnographic observation at funding events as well as on document analysis, we show how these arrangements are structured by a valorisation of efficiency. We propose to call this bio-efficiency, and relate it to a construal of the world as scarce.