Pathways to strong and weak resilience orientation in bioeconomy policies: A global configurational analysis of policy design space conditions

• Policy design spaces shape resilience concerns in bioeconomy policymaking globally. • fsQCA identifies pathways to strong and weak resilience orientations in policies. • Wealth and low corruption are core conditions for strong resilience orientation. • Permanent crops and oil dependence are linked to weak resilience orientation. • Climate change exposure has an ambiguous effect on resilience orientation. Governmental bioeconomy strategies around the globe promote the development of circular bioeconomies as pathway towards sustainable development. However, diverging bioeconomy visions emphasize either economic growth, sustainability, ecosystem biodiversity or biosphere compatibility. This article adopts a resilience perspective to explore how and why 78 bioeconomy strategies from 50 countries address the long-term viability of the bioeconomy. After assessing the strength of resilience orientations in these documents, the paper analyses how characteristics of the policy design space, which affect the willingness and capacity of bioeconomy policy designers, explain strong and weak resilience orientations. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) with five indicators for political, economic, land-use and environmental conditions confirms the assumption that high GDP and good governance are sufficient for strong resilience orientation, but only in connection with other factors. In contrast, low GDP combined with dependence on oil exports and specific land-use patterns explains many cases of weak resilience orientation.