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Dear colleagues Below the call for papers – Panel at XII Conference of Italian Environment Sociologists Best wishes Samadhi Lipari ***** PhD researcher School of Geography, Faculty of Earth & Environment University of Leeds – LS29JT, Miall 10.17, UK Web: https://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/s.lipari --- Bioeconomy between ecological modernisation and new capital accumulation cycles Keywords: bioeconomy, modernisation, accumulation Date: 26th-27th of September 2019 Location: University di Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084 Fisciano SA, Italy Organisers Samadhi Lipari, PhD researcher, School of Geography, Faculty of Earth & Environment University of Leeds Fabricio Rodríguez, Researcher, Junior Research Group "Bioeconomy and Inequalities”, Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University - Jena Description This panel is intended to contribute to the debate around bioeconomy (Birch, 2019; Mills, 2015). It looks into whether bioeconomy plays any role in tackling environmental crises interwoven with the contemporary organisation of socio-ecological relations or rather works as a socio-technical framework expanding markets in the web of life (Moore, 2015) and enabling –through legitimising discourses- new cycles of capital accumulation. Nature is no longer a free gift un unlimited repository of resources and functions to extract and feed into wealth creation processes (Marx et al., 1976; Smith, 1937; Ricardo, 1821; Foster, 1999; Harvey, 1982; Smith, 1984),. That production cycle upstream and downstream activities impact more and more evidently on ecosystems, therefore on lifeworlds (Husserl, 1970), is a widely accepted fact. The term Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2011) fits into the debate around this understanding, immediately picturing the co-constructing interdependencies between ecosystems and human activities (Birch, 2019; Moore, 2015; Foster, 2016). Production relations are no longer conceived as a structure superimposed over a discrete nature: this is in turn recursively either produced or deeply modified by them (Smith, 1984; Smith, 2009; Smith and O’Keefe, 1980). Yet, Anthropocene, while deconstructing some fixity around the concept of nature, poses others around social relations. Are observable effects on ecosystems the result of modernity’s human activities as such, or rather of a specific framework of productive relations, namely capitalism? In an effort to challenge the principle of ineluctability inherent to the term of Anthropocene, neo-marxian scholars historicise the Anthropocene notion, re-conceiving it as Capitalocene (Moore, 2015; Haraway, 2015). This reading, which resonate with Harvey and Smith’s works on spatialisation of capitalist relations, argues that macroscopic human driven ecosystems’ adjustments, among others climate change, are produced by capitalist organisation, rather than modern civilisation as such (Marx et al., 1976; Arrighi, n.d.; Harvey, 1982; Smith, 1984). In a reckless and crucial effort to vanquish -and capitalise on- overproduction crises, while maintaining a hegemonic legitimation shielding it from social turbulences, capitalism, as a regime of accumulation historically contextualised, incorporates rationalities once rooted in either critical or antagonistic frameworks, turning them in regulation modes (Aglietta, 2000), ensuring accumulation (Castree, 2008; Hajer, 1997; Goldstein, 2013; Hannah, 2000; Fletcher, 2010; Fletcher, 2017). In what ways and to what extent does the concept of the bioeconomy break with such rationalities? Is the concept of the bioeconomy an emerging mode of regulation and new legitimating platform for a new cycle of capital accumulation? If in the 1800s the unsustainability of capitalism was theorised in social terms and envisaged in ecological ones as a metabolic rift, the term sustainable development was introduced only in 1980, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (Marx et al., 1976; Foster, 1999). Sustainability as a concept has been evolving since then. Throughout the efforts to translate it into an analytical framework and policy principle, it is now framed within a corpus of theories stemming from neoclassical economics and ecology, which have ultimately formalised nature’s ‘services’ as a factor of the production function (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010). Under this body of knowledge known as ecological modernisation (ECM), there come theoretical and empirical works which build on a market logic of modernisation and competition for innovation combined with the marketing potential of global environmental imperatives (Jänicke, 2008; Ewing, 2017). ECM is also at the heart of energy supply chain innovation towards renewable sources, including biological ones. The multiple crises erupted between 2007 and 2008 around financial, food and energy supply chains have sparked criticism around biofuels for social and environmental sustainability issues. This has led to an increased research around bioeconomy opportunities, focusing on the use of biomasses, and derivative, in productive cycles. As a result, bioecomomy has progressively informed national and international policy agendas1, and enabled market expansion onto uncharted territories of bio-materials, genome enhancement for food and pharmaceutical production and waste management (Mills, 2015; Birch, 2019). 1 The most influential efforts at international level are The bioeconomy to 2030 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development., 2009)and The Knowledge Based Bio-Economy ( KBBE ) in Europe (Albrecht, J., Carrez, D., Cunningham, P., Daroda, L., Mancia, R.,Máthé, L., Raschka, A., Carus, M., & Piotrowski, 2010). Dedicated national policies are in force in the following states: the US, Canada, Greenland, Island, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, Japan and Malesia (Mills, 2015). The panel welcomes presentations exploring bioeconomy- at a multiple spatial scale- and critically juxtaposing it to the notions of Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The panel’s main aim is to contribute to our understanding of bioeconony’s role in the framing of socio-ecological relations. To this purpose, particularly encouraged are presentations focusing on conflicts and inequalities, especially from labour and gender perspectives, which problematize the dimensions of material and financial flows related to feed, food, energy and waste, as well as the interplaying of the international, national, regional and territorial scale. REFERENCES Aglietta, M. 2000. A theory of capitalist regulation: The US experience [Online]. [Accessed 5 June 2017]. Available from: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Krx8K0YIIfAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=A+theory+of+capitalist+regulation:+the+US+experience&ots=E-EAl4fHlx&sig=gaSOLMDT4kHmmWrq_h6mKAF2RFk Albrecht, J., Carrez, D., Cunningham, P., Daroda, L., Mancia, R.,Máthé, L., Raschka, A., Carus, M., & Piotrowski, S. (2010). 2010. The Knowledge Based Bio-Economy ( KBBE ) in Europe : Achievements and Challenges. 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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 369(1938),pp.842–867. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1