Toward a caring and (re)productive bioeconomy? A feminist analysis of socio-technical innovations and sustainability shortcomings

Abstract

The bioeconomy is touted as an innovative economic approach to make economies more sustainable through the use of biological resources and processes. In many bioeconomy policies, the expansion of biomass is key and is enabled by new biotechnologies and precision agriculture (PA). We respond to the demand for critical approaches to sustainability and ask: How can feminist (sustainability) research – specifically feminist ecological economics and feminist science and technology studies – help to assess the sustainability shortcomings of socio-technical innovations in the bioeconomy? We have drawn from these two fields to construct a framework of analysis and illustrate its application by looking at the field of PA, which has emblematic socio-technical innovations for biomass production in the agricultural bioeconomy. We illustrate how this analytical framework can reveal manifold sustainability shortcomings linked to these innovations, such as the reinforcement of power relations; the promotion of productivism; the undermining of precaution, sufficiency, and cooperation in technology development; the fetishization of data; and the delegitimization of local knowledge. While the application of the analytical framework is only exemplary, it shows how such an analysis allows for a fine-grained and multifaceted assessment of a specific field of innovations in the bioeconomy and how it can draw attention to structural and systemic sustainability shortcomings which are often overlooked.

Keywords

• precision agriculture
• care
• precaution
• science and technology studies
• feminist critical sustainability sciences
• analytical framework