Promises for recovery. Reimagining the bioeconomy as a model for development in Argentina.

BORTZ GABRIELA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; REPAL Annual Meeting 2022; 2022

Universidad Torcuato Di Tella y REPAL

Argentina faces a chronic state of overlapped crises (economic, social, political, and environmental). In a scenario of external restriction, economic deficit and inflation, the agricultural frontier kept expanding over forests and wetlands, and new GM releases, framed as job and income creators, appear as solutions amidst alerts of harmful socio-environmental effects. In the 2010s, the term “bioeconomy”, entered the S&T policy agenda, becoming a resonant discourse to face inequalities in the access to basic goods (health, food, energy supply), labor precariousness, and natural resources depletion, today as chronic as acute. The bioeconomy is considered an opportunity, given Argentina’s competitive advantages in biological resources and S&T capabilities. It is argued that this “new paradigm” can lead to regional development, contributing to environmental sustainability and social inclusion. Since, multiple initiatives attempted to engage the public into a collectively held vision, towards new images of modernity. The bioeconomy became what Jasanoff and Kim (2009) address as “sociotechnical imaginaries”, “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and development of specific scientific and/or technological projects at the level of nation-states”. Despite its public resonance, the term remains contested, as well as reinforcing linear assumptions on inclusion and sustainability as spillover effects. Simultaneously, the current socio-productive model, and its bioeconomy as a political economy national project, remains excluded from a broader democratic debate. Why is the bioeconomy envisaged as a development imaginary in Argentina? How is it framed and how it performs political economy pathways? How are development and inequality reduction conceived under this narrative? This requires a symmetrical understanding of how Science and Technology become incorporated in governance and state-making, and how governance practices shape knowledge-making and its use, (re)configuration of nature and land and its resources crafting development alternatives. This work resources to a qualitative design, based on (a) documentary analysis (projects, government documents, technical reports, news, scientific papers, etc.); (b) 23 in-depth interviews, conducted in May-June 2021 (national and international policy-makers, researchers, consultants, corporate executives, agricultural producers, activists); (c) participant observation in 2 bioeconomy courses and 6 bioeconomy events (2013-2021). In disciplinarian terms, it triangulates theoretical inputs from the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy, Sociology of Science and Technology (Jasanoff, 2004; 2015; Levidow et al 2013), and Political Economy (Newell, 2009; Glover and Newell, 2004; Delvenne et al, 2013; Birch, 2017). This work is carried out within a project aimed to analyze the co-production of bioeconomy in Argentina and Latin America as a development model. Between techno-optimism and disenchantments, we explore envisaged roles for STI towards inclusive and sustainable economies, restoring soils and jobs, and (re)configuring the national territory, its resources and landscape.