The role of sustainability in the emergence and evolution of bioeconomy clusters: An application of a multiscalar framework

Bioeconomy clusters, besides stimulating economic and innovative performance, are expected to promote sustainable regional development. Despite their growing popularity, there is still a lack of awareness about how these clusters contribute to sustainability. This paper aims at increasing our understanding of the processes through which bioeconomy clusters generate sustainability effects and promote the bioeconomy transition. We analyze the event-history of the French Bazancourt-Pomacle cluster and interpret its development as a continuous interplay among its geographical, institutional, and structural scales to capture how these dynamics eventually affect specific sustainability scales. The results of the scale analysis reveal that the actors of the biocluster maintain a certain mode of action by organizing their activities along scales related to the valorization of local natural resources, whereas improvements of sustainability appear as a posteriori result of these activities rather than an aim in itself. Our study contributes with novel insights to the literature on sustainability transitions and clusters as well as demonstrates the potential of the scale-perspective for identification and measurement of sustainability trade-offs in a way accessible to policy makers.