Bioeconomy in the European Union was considered a long-term vision leading to increased competitiveness, better use of resources and reduction of carbon footprint already since 2005. Bioeconomy remains one of the key strategies by European countries in the immediate as well as more distant future. The European Commission developed the guidelines, which were followed by instruments enabling the implementation of action plans and strategies. In some European countries, among them Germany and the Netherland as the leading ones, such systems are already deeply rooted in their economic reforms. This includes circular economy, use of biomass, principle of added value cascade and biorefineries. There are opportunities in the field of the processing industry, different fields of biomass production and processing such as agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, food and wood processing, as well as general biobased industry. The aim of this research was to assess the bioeconomy opportunities and factors influencing bioeconomy. Our study was conducted by in-depth semi-structured interviews with several shareholders from industry, research institutions, policy makers and clusters in Slovenia. Surprisingly, we have observed, that in Slovenia, there is practically no strategy focusing on the transition towards bioeconomy, but only few short-term examples of good practice in this field. Although a number of research projects have been conducted in this sector, and considering very low availability of investments in this field, an underdeveloped market and low awareness-level, there are only few biobased products avaiable on the Slovene market. The potential of clustering has thus become been underexploited.
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