On the Circular Bioeconomy and Decoupling: Implications for Sustainable Growth

This paper explores the existing confusion around the conceptual definitions and interpretations of the term circular bioeconomy.The co-existence of diametrically opposite interpretations of the concept indicates lack of a serious discussion of its theoretical foundations.Two narratives on circular bioeconomy are explored in depth: (i) the new economic paradigm based on technological progress (the economics of technological promises) that seeks perpetual economic growth; (ii) an entropic (thermodynamic) narrative that reflects on the limits on economic growth imposed by nature.The latter narrative makes a distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary resource flows and helps to identify what can and cannot be re-circulated within the metabolic pattern of social-ecological systems.Adopting the biophysical view, it becomes clear that the industrial revolution represented a linearization of material and energy flows with the goal to overcome the low pace and density of biological transformations.The required level of productivity of production factors in contemporary developed economies (flows per hour of labor and per hectare of land use) is orders of magnitude larger than the pace and density of supply and sink capacity of natural processes.Relying on nature to 'close the loop' will simply slow down the economic process.GHG emissions).This panacea goes under different names, such as green economy, bioeconomy, circular economy (D'Amato et al., 2017) and recently circular bioeconomy.Lazarevic and Valve (Lazarevic and Valve, 2017) observed that "the emergence and mobilization of expectation that are shaping the EU transition framed as a reassuring discourse and the necessary transition from the current linear economy by its prominent promoters" (p.60).Generating expectations can be seen as a political activity with the goal of mobilizing resources and 'colonizing' the future (Brown and Michael, 2003).Jasanoff and Kim (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) proposed the term 'economics of technological promises' for this strategy.However, experience teaches us that hypes are often followed by disappointments (Brown and Michael, 2003;Bakker and Budde, 2012;Konrad, 2006).In the 1950s, we were promised that nuclear energy would produce electricity 'too cheap to meter'.In the 1970's, genetically modified crops were supposed to eradicate hunger from our vocabulary.In the 1980's, the hydrogen economy was going to solve our dependence on fossil energy.Having failed to do so, the same result was promised for the first generation of agro-biofuels in the 90s.Given that the coherency of narratives used to define policies is extremely important to anticipate success or failure, this paper seeks to clarify the existing confusion about the meaning and normative implications associated with the use of the two terms 'circular economy' and 'bioeconomy' and their combination into 'circular bioeconomy'.To this purpose, the paper provides a critical appraisal of the "conventional