Transforming from Coal to Bioeconomy: Discourse network analysis of policy approaches

The challenges of designing and implementing a more sustainable management of resource systems are particularly urgent for lignite-mining regions, that simultaneously have to manage the impacts of structural change and politically induced phase-out. For Germany’s ‘coal regions’, the strategy of developing a „bioeconomy“ has been proposed, an economy built on the use of biological resources and biotechnologies under the paradigm of sustainability. Such a transformation is not only techno-economically complex, but path dependency and goal conflicts exist also in the socio-political sphere. Designing and implementing a sustainable bioeconomy requires stakeholders‘ acceptance of and active participation in negotiating policy decisions.In order to identify potential challenges for a sustainability transformation from a stakeholder agreement perspective, we analyze the coherence of policy suggestions across bioeconomy strategies for different policy actors. To this aim, we apply discourse network analysis, a mixed methods approach combining qualitative content and quantitative network analysis, to the case of the German bioeconomy emergence. Strategic documents by EU, German national and sub-national government bodies are analyzed in terms of the actors‘ agreement on proposed policy concepts, providing results on the contents, structures and tensions of the policy debate. Special focus rests on the extent to which the Sustainable Development Goals are considered in policy suggestions, and who promotes them.This analysis will provide two contributions, (a) an identification of the types of policy solutions discussed in regional sustainability transformations and (b) a revelation of the major lines of conflict and agreement between policy actors. In addition, this work tests an innovative political science approach for the complex task of investigating the management of natural resources