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A response to the EU Bioeconomy Strategy from a Central and Eastern European perspective – GEONARDO

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ByGreenovate! Europe

The European Commission’s Communication A Strategic Framework for a Competitive and Sustainable EU Bioeconomy presents the bioeconomy as a key instrument for strengthening European competitiveness, industrial resilience, and strategic autonomy. The Strategy prioritises innovation scale-up, market creation for bio-based products, sustainable biomass supply, and Europe’s role in global bio-based value chains. These priorities reflect widely accepted policy concerns related to climate objectives, economic security, and geopolitical uncertainty, and illustrate a move from agenda setting towards implementation and market deployment. Based on available information, however, it remains uncertain how far this shift reflects the diverse implementation conditions across EU Member States.

This opinion piece examines the Strategy from a Central and Eastern European perspective (CEE), drawing mainly on evidence from the CEE2ACT project and complemented by insights from macro-regional initiatives, EU agencies, and independent research. The focus is on factors that repeatedly determine whether bioeconomy strategies in CEE countries lead to tangible implementation rather than remain policy aspirations.

The central issue is not whether the Strategy’s objectives are appropriate, but whether its assumptions about institutional capacity, market readiness, and convergence across regions align with realities observed in CEE. At a strategic level, the Strategy relies largely on aggregated EU-level indicators and horizontal policy instruments. While this provides coherence at EU scale, experience from CEE countries suggests that it underestimates persistent structural differences between Member States. Analyses under the BIOEAST Initiative[1] and comparative academic work show that bioeconomy development in CEE countries is constrained less by access to biomass or research capacity than by fragmented governance, weak inter-ministerial coordination, and uneven administrative capacity.[2],[3],[4] Although the Strategy acknowledges the regional diversity conceptually, it offers limited guidance on how differentiation will be applied in practice.

These constraints are particularly visible in the Strategy’s approach to innovation scale-up and regulation. Measures such as regulatory sandboxes, accelerated authorisation procedures, and coordination under the forthcoming EU Biotech Act address real barriers.[5] However, CEE2ACT evaluations show that regulatory challenges in CEE countries are often amplified by limited administrative resources, institutional instability, and staff turnover, issues that EU-level simplification alone cannot resolve.[6],[7],[8] Without sustained national capacity building, regulatory streamlining risks benefiting countries with already mature systems disproportionately.

The same structural imbalances also shape how the Strategy approaches investment. Instruments such as the Bioeconomy Investment Deployment Group, coordinated public and private investment, CBE-JU, blended finance, and alignment with Horizon Europe and InvestEU assume the existence of regionally distributed, investment-ready project pipelines. Independent analysis from the European Investment Bank challenges this assumption, highlighting a substantial EU bioeconomy investment gap of €121.8 billion annually[9], and structural barriers in emerging and rural regions facing the greatest difficulty in mobilising private capital, high perceived risk and weak project preparation capacity.[10] CEE2ACT findings also confirm that limited access to finance in CEE countries is primarily linked to low investment readiness rather than a lack of funding instruments as such.[11]

The Strategy places greater emphasis on demand-side measures, such as green public procurement and voluntary demand aggregation initiatives like the Bio-based Europe Alliance. While this reflects broad agreement that markets will not develop without intervention, evidence from CEE2ACT shows that procurement systems in many CEE countries remain rigid and risk-averse. As a result, demand-side instruments tend to favour established actors unless specific safeguards support SMEs and regional participation.

While the Strategy recognises governance, skills, and stakeholder engagement as enabling factors, these are treated mainly as supporting actions rather than core institutional infrastructure. CEE2ACT evaluations repeatedly identify the absence of permanent coordination platforms and continuous knowledge transfer mechanisms as a key reason why bioeconomy initiatives in CEE countries struggle to move beyond pilot stages.

The EU Bioeconomy Strategy offers a coherent framework focused on competitiveness and deployment. However, converging evidence suggests that its implementation logic insufficiently accounts for persistent structural disparities across Member States. The main risk lies not in the Strategy’s ambition, but in its assumption of broadly similar institutional capacity. Without clearer differentiation, targeted capacity building, and durable implementation structures, there is a threat that the Strategy could reproduce existing gaps between mature and widening (CEE) bioeconomy regions.

Written by Dóra Leitner, Project Manager at GEONARDO

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