Making Sense of the Bioeconomy: A Critical Analysis of EU Policy Narratives and Responses

ABSTRACT The bioeconomy has become an increasingly popular concept in European Union (EU) policy, promising sustainable growth, job creation, and reduced environmental impacts. Yet its meaning remains contested, ambiguous, and politically charged. This study critically examines how EU bioeconomy policy narratives prior to 2025 construct this concept and how the extended peer community makes sense of, negotiates, and critiques these narratives through a boundary object lens. By combining narrative analysis with in‐depth interviews and an exploratory workshop, we identify nine distinct policy narratives. While many reproduce the familiar bio‐resource storylines, others fall within the Eco‐Retreat option space or frame the bioeconomy primarily as a policy‐making exercise, revealing greater complexity than previous studies suggest. The findings show a clear discrepancy between the EU's open‐structured narratives and the more grounded, discipline‐specific interpretations of practitioners and experts. Members of the extended peer community both appropriate and challenge the concept; some embrace its flexibility and coalition‐building potential, endorsing its environmental sustainability, social benefits, and growth prospects, while others question its scope, plausibility, and credibility, pointing to overlooked trade‐offs, unrealistic expectations, and unresolved normative commitments. Using the boundary object lens, the bioeconomy is seen as enabling political convergence across diverse interests, albeit at the expense of conceptual clarity. While this ambiguity supports broad alignment, it may also mask underlying conflicts and limit transformative potential. The study argues that embracing rather than smoothing over discord could strengthen the robustness and legitimacy of future bioeconomy governance, while acknowledging that this might be politically difficult.