What the EU Bioeconomy Strategy still needs to deliver: governance, feedstocks incentives, and skills as conditions for scale-up
The EU bioeconomy, worth up to €2.7 trillion and employing 17.1 million people, is already a big lever for sustainable economic growth in Europe. The Commission’s New Strategic Framework, published in November 2025 and welcomed by the Council in March 2026, acknowledges this scale and sets out an ambitious vision for 2040. But ambition on paper has not, so far, translated into the structural conditions needed for the bioeconomy to grow at the pace the green transition demands. Governance remains fragmented across policy levels, regional disparities leave large parts of Europe effectively outside the bioeconomy, and the shift from pilot projects to industrial-scale deployment continues to stall for need of clear targets and investment certainty.
As outlined in the Greenovate! Europe position paper, the Framework is a necessary step, but it will only matter if it is backed by binding commitments, coordinated governance, skill training, and sustained public support. Drawing on our experience across Horizon Europe projects, this paper sets out what that must look like in practice.
Governance fragmentation is one of the greatest barriers to bioeconomy scale-up
The absence of clear and cohesive national strategies leaves stakeholders uncertain about the long-term vision, goals, and measures for bioeconomy implementation. For this reason, moving to large-scale deployment will require strengthened governance frameworks that enable coordination across different policy areas and improve coherence between EU and national measures.
A strategic lever to enhance national strategies is to establish national bioeconomy hubs, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, where strategies are less developed. As demonstrated by the CEE2ACT project, national bioeconomy hubs can serve as a permanent and bottom-up driving force of the national-level bioeconomy, providing a platform for dialogue between industry, research, policymakers, and society. They must receive permanent funding to sustain stakeholder engagement, policy co-creation, and knowledge transfer in the long term.
The circular bioeconomy needs stronger demand-side instruments
The transition towards a circular bioeconomy depends on prioritising secondary biomass streams, such as agricultural residues, by-products, organic waste, and industrial side flows over primary feedstocks. The reason is not only environmental, but also economic. On the environmental side, primary feedstocks compete with food systems and open new resource extraction instead of closing material loops. The economic argument is equally compelling. Secondary feedstocks are largely already available within existing industrial and agricultural systems, meaning that building value chains around them can reduce import dependency, lower costs over time, and generate returns from resources that are currently wasted.
Binding mandates for bio-based materials should reflect this cascade principle. Clear and quantified targets for feedstock production and end-use uptake provide investment certainty and reduce market and coordination risks. The MarginUp! Project demonstrates how marginal and low-productivity lands can be converted into productive biomass sources for bio-based value chains (animal feed, biogas, fertilisers). To develop markets for secondary feedstocks, green public procurement will also play an essential role and should be elevated from a voluntary practice to a strategic market-making instrument.
Knowledge transfer is not a soft priority, but an enabling condition
The bioeconomy transition requires a workforce equipped with technical (e.g., green chemistry and bioprocessing), entrepreneurial, and systems-thinking competencies. Yet the institutional capacity to develop and transfer this broad knowledge effectively remains underdeveloped in Europe. The current mismatch between the current workforce and the skills required in the emerging bio-based value chains is a structural constraint that cannot be solved by R&I funding alone. Retooling the workforce with a multidisciplinary approach is as much a precondition for scaling up as incentives for bio-based materials.
This breadth of competence means that knowledge transfer cannot be reduced to training programmes. Beyond technical expertise, it must also consider socio-economic and political dimensions, the structure of education systems, public engagement, and the governance frameworks necessary for a sustainable bioeconomy transition. Successful knowledge transfer requires structured collaboration, where the ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ not only exchange knowledge but also ensure its practical application, absorption, and replication.
Regional demonstration hubs (as developed in the CEE2ACT project), digital knowledge platforms, and structured cross-regional and international collaboration are proven vehicles for replicating innovation at scale. These should be treated not as project deliverables but as permanent infrastructure for a learning bioeconomy.
