Regional bioeconomies in Catalonia and Finnish Lapland : [Regionala bioekonomier i Katalonien och finska Lappland]

This policy brief explores the bioeconomy strategies implemented in two different European regions, by describing some of the strategies used to promote and implement a bioeconomy agenda in Catalonia and Finnish Lapland, with a focus on the actors involved, their roles and the interactions with other relevant actors or stakeholders. Catalonia does not have a single bioeconomy strategy. Instead, different public organisations from the regional government have designed and implemented their own agendas, partly based on the European Union bioeconomy and circular economy strategies. The regional agency in charge of promoting innovation and competitiveness amongst firms and businesses (ACCIO), and the Forest Science and TechnologyCentre of Catalonia (CTFC), are the organisations with the greatest advancements in implementing a bioeconomy agenda. Their approach to the bioeconomy and the actors involved vary greatly, depending on the economic sector targeted. While ACCIO approaches the bioeconomy mostly as a process of industrial transformation that should use existing competitiveadvantages, CTFC sees the bioeconomy as an opportunity to boost an underdeveloped economic sector (forestry). Lapland, on the other hand, has structured its bioeconomy agenda within the smart specialisation strategy, which prioritises five clusters of selected economic areas. Two of those clusters are directly related to bioeconomy and circular economy. The first cluster, called Artic Industry and Circular Economy targets the region’s main economic sectors, aiming to promote circular solutions, efficient use of natural resources and industrial symbiosis. The second cluster, called Arctic Smart Rural Communities, is more preoccupied with rural villages and rural entrepreneurs’ well-being and steady income, incentivising local production of food and decentralised energy systems.Both regions show that accounting for regional diversity iscrucial for a successful bioeconomy strategy, as the strategies depend on a variety of institutional, social and economic factors. This also implies that there is not one single way to understand bioeconomy, as its definition adapts to the local context, whether it is bioeconomy as the use of natural resources, circular bioeconomy as efficient industrial production, or a combination of both. This context dependence poses challenges for practitioners and policy makers, as adapting the strategies will require innovative approaches, networking and collaborations with different kinds of actors at different scales