Towards a circular forest bioeconomy: the road travelled and the challenges of territorial implementation
Résumé
The circular economy (CE) and the bioeconomy (BE) are two concepts seeking to address sustainability
issues. They were both developed over the last decades based on new approaches to the relationships
between the economy and the environment which, in particular, propose alternatives to current linear
economic models based on resource extraction. Although institutional efforts seek to promote common
frameworks, the combination of these two concepts with shifting contours produces a complex nebula of
interpretations, where the least ambitious conceptions of sustainability dominate, benefitting from these
ambiguities.
From our perspective, there is an ongoing need to clarify the criteria defining a sustainable circular
bioeconomy (CBE) as well as its goals and how strategies seeking to foster its implementation contribute to
reaching them. This clarification requires an approach grounded into sectoral and regional specificities. We
focus on the forest sector and investigate the challenges inherent to the assessment and implementation of
a sustainable forest circular bioeconomy (FCBE) at the territorial scale.
In this article, our general aim is to clarify how BE and CE have been conceptualised and operationalised in
academic research focused on the forest sector. Our first specific objective is to present a quantified
overview of the scientific literature, and to identify the different definitions of the concepts used, how they
relate to one another, and to document how they have been (and are being) developed across several
(un)related research clusters and disciplines. Second, the systematic analysis of the literature draws our
attention to two specific, transversal questions which, in our view, need to be specifically addressed, and
which we investigate by performing a more in-depth, narrative reading of the corpus of retrieved
publications. These two issues concern (1) the insufficient accounting for the spatial dimension of the forest
CBE, particularly at the territory scale and (2) the need to clarify how sustainability assessments of the FCBE
should be performed, especially in a context of transition.