Bioeconomy policy is often labelled a policy field or at least an emerging policy field. But is it really one? And how can one tell and what does it mean? Drawing on the scarce research on what exactly are policy fields and what are the factors driving their emergence, we aim to answer these questions based on the definition of a policy field as a specific and long-term constellation of related problems, actors, institutions and instruments. Empirically drawing on the European Union and Germany, in a first step we find that bioeconomy policy can be characterised as an emerging policy field at most, as it is limitedly institutionalised and lacks a genuinely bioeconomy-related actor constellation and problem structure. Moreover, there are hardly any bioeconomy-specific instruments in place. In a second step, we find that the fragmented institutional and regulatory landscape particularly hinders the establishment of bioeconomy policy as a policy field, as do the ambiguity and inconsistency of its overarching goals as well as its fragile supportive actor constellations. As a result, bioeconomy policy to date rather serves as a conceptual umbrella for a number of already existing policies, so far with little tangible effect.

Climate policy is expected to consider the current state of science. As populist radical right parties (PRRP) become elected members of parliaments, they have a greater influence on integration processes between science and politics. The aim of the paper is to show that instead of generally rejecting climate science, PRRPs appeal to ‘alternative expertise’ and politicize scientific knowledge. With our empirical analysis of public hearings, plenary meetings and press statements discussing Germany’s Climate Package between 2018 and 2020, we show that the AfD uses expertise that suits their political interests very selectively and arbitrarily supporting either scientific outsider positions or positions that only pretend to be scientific. We argue that populist strategies weaken trust in scientific expertise by undermining democratic institutions for knowledge integration in climate governance. Therefore, a clear separation between research and politics together with transparent and formal scientific knowledge integration processes are needed.

The National Climate Initiative (NKI) in Germany provides a strong incentive for local governments to apply for funding to engage in climate protection activities. Yet, the latest evaluation of the NKI confirms that there is a great disparity in the distribution of funding across regions. Taking this regional fragmentation as a starting point, we ask the following: How can we explain disparity in the amount of funding across counties and cities? We draw on climate policy literature pointing to the role of socioeconomic and political determinants and the settlement structure to answer this question. We study all 400 cities and counties to test hypotheses concerning disparity in the likelihood and amount of climate funding, using data from the German Ministry for the Environment and further regional statistics. Running different multilevel regression models, we show that local climate funding is more likely in cities and more urbanized counties than in rural counties with less population and oftentimes also with less young and educated people. We argue that despite the increasing number of local governments getting active in climate protection in Germany, there is important unused potential for climate change mitigation in rural counties. Therefore, we conclude by proposing a new research agenda focusing on climate change mitigation in rural areas.

The concept of the bioeconomy has risen to great popularity with governments around the world as a new paradigm for a sustainable economy. However, it is still highly contentious what the bioeconomy actually is or should be, which results in a certain vagueness of bioeconomy policy strategies. European bioeconomy policy is a prime example of this. Despite two dedicated bioeconomy strategies, it appears to be highly fragmented and heterogeneous when it comes to concrete political processes and measures. Against this backdrop, we aim to find patterns of European bioeconomy policy by applying the political process-inherent dynamics approach (PIDA) to the three sub-areas of bioplastics, biofuels and bioenergy. Aggregating the respective results, the overarching pattern of European bioeconomy policy is rather shaped by the interplay of specific problem structures, institutional frameworks and actor constellations in its policy sub-areas than by the ambiguous umbrella concept of the bioeconomy.