Sustainable Transitions on the Move - Guiding Visions for a Circular Bioeconomy in Scandinavia

Grand societal challenges such as climate change, ageing population and food security feature increasingly on the agenda of policymakers at all scales. While traditional mission-oriented research and innovation policies were largely framed in technical terms, challenge-based policies claim to be less instrumental and more open-ended. One cannot simply specify the problem and develop a diagnosis but one needs to learn about the nature of the grand challenge in order to address it. This implies greater deliberation and contestation, both with respect to policy aims and means, and involves new actor constellations that include a larger variety of actors, and consider new roles for traditional actors (Kuhlmann and Rip 2014). Even if policies start to be aimed at addressing these challenges, this new framing of research and innovation policies is still under-developed and it remains unclear how to implement such policies (Coenen et al. 2015; Schot and Steinmuller 2016).