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Bioeconomy and common agricultural policy: a bibliometric network analysis

Konstantinis Alvertos

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Summary

During the past years, due to the ever more increasing environmental and economic deadlocks of the existing linear, conventional dipole of production-consumption, an increased critique, both institutional and social, is observed regarding the re-orientation of the means and the goals of the production in light of the awareness that the material sufficiency of the planet is finite. In this context, the debate on the bio-economy as an alternative has entered the dialogue dynamically. According to the European Commission, the bio-economy is defined as "all the parts of the economy that use renewable resources from land and sea - such as crops, forests, fish, animals and micro-organisms - for food production, materials and energy ', a definition which is indicative of the importance of the biological raw material in this system. Within the framework of the EU, however, sectors that are decisive for the production of the raw material, eg. agriculture, have already been “shaped” by previously established policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). More specifically, the European Commission states that the bio-economy strategy "will seek synergies and respect complementarity with other policies, instruments and sources of funding with which they share and address the same areas as the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, integrated maritime policy, environmental, industrial, employment, energy and health policies." This thesis aims to study the bio-economy as an autonomous structure through scientific literature, but also to identify the key areas of co-influence of the two schemes (bio-economy, CAP), the compromise of possible contradictions of which, will benefit their coexistence and operation. We have chosen to refer to the scientific literature for three (3) main reasons. First of all, we considered that, each year’s shifts in the interest of the scientific community in these subjects reflect the dynamic evolution of the forms of the studied schemes. Secondly, at an institutional level, the flexibility and the different forms that the bio-economy can take allow states to define and set objectives, according to the same needs and peculiarities, which create differentiated forms of bio-economy. Through the scientific literature, we are able to derive a holistic definition of the bio-economy which will contain all the possible terms of the scheme, while the abovementioned variations will be comprised in a way that the definition of different "gravity-value ratios" in each term achieves the coincidence of the bibliographic with the relevant state or institutional definition. Finally, the different institutional nature of the two structures, the bio-economy in the EU has a strategic position while the CAP is an established EU policy, requires us to look at the scientific literature to avoid a comparison of inequalities in terms of binding decisions and documents and, on the other hand, to follow a reverse course, and • starting from the final footprint of the two figures, as received by the scientific community, to arrive at the synthesis, the key areas of their co-effect. Methodologically, in order to include in our study all of the available literature, we constructed networks of interrelated-interactive terms that contain the keywords chosen by the scholars to summarize their texts, based on their relevance in space and time and we tried to convert quantitative bibliographic information into qualitative conclusions. Simply put, we considered that any complex and multifactorial concept can be broken down into simpler-basic ones, provided that they are constantly placed in the proper "signaling distance" from the central one. Our analysis concluded to two (2) major results. Firstly, the concept of bio-economy as an autonomous scheme and its projection and evolution in the future as a reformed circular economy model and the possibility of combining them with a new model of circular bio-economy were examined; Secondly, we attempted to link the existing way of organizing the bio-economy in relation to the Common Agricultural Policy and the identification of the key points of common influence overcoming the differences which, in general, would improve the coexistence of the two schemes.

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