We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest article “Policy design for resilience? An assessment of the bioeconomy policy mix addressing the maize bio-based production system in Italy Author links open overlay panel”, which offers an in-depth analysis of bioeconomy policy design in Italy and examines whether the existing policy mix supports the resilience of the maize bio-based production system.

Giorgio Varanini and Peter H. Feindt point at diverging resilience orientations within the policy mix. Agricultural policies tend to promote robustness and, to some extent, adaptability, while bioeconomy policies are largely oriented toward transformability. This divergence reveals an important mismatch: under the current configuration, transformability-oriented goals in bioeconomy policy are more likely to materialise upstream in the value chain rather than at the level of the bio-based production system itself.

The findings expose key tensions and opportunities for strengthening coherence between agricultural and bioeconomy policy mixes. Enhancing alignment between these two domains could play a crucial role in supporting more sustainable and resilient bio-based production systems in the future.

You can read the full article in the Ecological Economics journal by Elsevier.