Felice: Il Bioeconomista has been covering the European bioeconomy beat with the kind of patience that only makes sense if you believe the subject actually matters — and this week, it does.
Marguerite: Today we’re sitting with one conversation that covers a lot of ground: where European bioeconomy policy stands after last year’s strategy, what came out of the Global Bioeconomy Summit in Dublin, and what the new mechanisms for investment and market-building are actually supposed to do.
Felice: Let’s start with the interview with Agata Kotkowska (DG Envi of European Commission) by Mario Bonaccorso — Brussels, definitions, and the gap between strategy and a factory that actually gets built.
Agata Kotkowska on Europe’s Bioeconomy Moment
Marguerite: The central tension here is one the EU has been living with for years: strong research, strong policy ambition, and a persistent failure to get bio-based projects financed and built at scale.
Felice: Kotkowska names it directly. The setup is her answer on Dublin’s biggest takeaway, and she puts it plainly: “The bottleneck is no longer the science. It is scale-up and deployment: first-of-a-kind plants, access to capital, and predictable demand.”
Marguerite: That framing matters because it shifts the conversation. The policy problem isn’t generating more research — it’s connecting existing technologies to the capital and offtake agreements that make a plant bankable.
Felice: Which is exactly what the two new coordination mechanisms presented in Dublin are designed to address, and they’re worth distinguishing.
Marguerite: The Bio-based Europe Alliance works on the demand side — bringing buyers and suppliers together to forge the long-term commitments that make investment decisions possible. Kotkowska says they received more than a hundred expressions of interest during the call, with a first high-level plenary planned for early 2027.
Felice: So the demand signal exists. The question is whether commitments follow.
Marguerite: The Bioeconomy Investment Deployment Group works the finance side — connecting promising projects with venture capital, national promotional banks, and the European Investment Bank Group. Kotkowska is direct about the target: “projects financed and plants built in Europe, rather than abroad.”
Felice: That “rather than abroad” is doing a lot of work. Technologies developed in European labs commercialised elsewhere is the specific risk she names — and it’s a real one given what the US and China are putting into biomanufacturing.
Marguerite: She also addresses definitions, the Circular Economy Act, and Biotech Act II. On definitions, she acknowledges industry’s frustration — without a common understanding of what qualifies as bio-based and sustainable, support schemes and consumer communication both fall apart — but stops short of previewing the final proposal.
Felice: And on the bigger picture, she’s unambiguous: the bioeconomy already represents five percent of EU GDP, much of it in rural and coastal regions, and the strategic stakes are high enough that standing still isn’t really an option.
Marguerite: The through-line across all of it is the phrase she returns to: 2026 and 2027 are about delivery. Three building blocks — creating markets, mobilising investment, enabling regulation — and two new mechanisms to prove the shift from strategy to action is real.
Felice: Whether the contracts and the plants follow is the story the next few years will tell.
Marguerite: The Dublin summit, the Alliance, the Investment Group — the scaffolding for implementation is up. The question is what gets built inside it.
Felice: Next time, we’ll see whether the delivery phase holds. The gap between a plenary meeting and a functioning plant is where policy either earns its keep or doesn’t.
