Stakeholder Engagement in the Co-Design of Regional Bioeconomy Strategies

Increasing recognition and importance is being given to regions for their role in supporting Europe’s transformation towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy system. Regions are often feedstock producers and can provide the proximity of regional actors along the value chain. If supported and mobilized, actors can coordinate strategic paths for regional bioeconomy development and keep value added in the region. Regional bioeconomy strategies are an important instrument to reach such a process, which implies great efforts of coordination among relevant stakeholders. In this research, we developed a guideline to establish flexible dynamic bioeconomy platforms—Regional Bioeconomy Hubs (RBHs)—that bring together bioeconomy-related stakeholders from policy, academia, industry, and society in a structured procedure (quadruple-helix context) and to establish regional bioeconomy strategies. The guideline was applied to five Central and Eastern European regions and validated in the framework of the POWER4BIO project. As a result, all regions successfully applied the guideline, established their RBH, and developed a regional bioeconomy strategy or recommendations for the development of such a strategy.