A study published earlier this month in Frontiers in Environmental Science finds that 76 countries now have some form of national bioeconomy plan, yet even the most advanced of them fail to capture the full range of social and ecological conditions involved. Researchers Jianchu Xu and R. Edward Grumbine found that none of the 76 plans specifically addresses Indigenous Peoples and local communities living in mountain regions, even as the bioeconomy itself has grown well beyond its original focus on replacing fossil-based resources. It now increasingly touches biotechnology, circular production, biodiversity protection, digital technologies, agriculture and biological materials. The technology moved. The governance did not.
Biotechnology Makes the Gap Hardest to Ignore
The tension shows up most clearly in biotechnology. Around 50 countries are developing national biotechnology plans, the study finds, while private startup funding for biotech projects expands rapidly through gene editing, anaerobic digestion, cellular foods and microbial applications. Despite that pace, few biotechnology projects in the literature involve Indigenous Peoples and local communities as actual partners, and the authors trace the shortfall to three barriers: differing values around ownership, limited practical access to modern biotechnology, and unresolved regulatory questions. Debates over intellectual property and genetic material ownership remain unsettled, and the paper argues existing access and benefit-sharing rules can disadvantage Indigenous communities, a pattern that echoes the traceability gap already documented in deforestation-free sourcing commitments. For companies operating in the bioeconomy, that turns governance into a practical question about who has the authority to grant access to biological materials and how any resulting benefits get shared.
Land, Data and Decision-Making Sit With Governments and Businesses
The same governance gap extends past biotechnology. Most bioeconomy decision-making remains concentrated among governments and businesses, with local communities largely absent from the room, and unresolved questions persist around land tenure, resource rights and political participation. Digitalization adds another layer: as remote sensing and other data-intensive tools become part of agriculture and natural-resource management, projects generate information about landscapes and communities that raises questions about Indigenous data sovereignty, an issue increasingly relevant to how far upstream companies now have to look when mapping their supply chains. The stakes are sizable: more than 25% of global lands are managed in some form by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, mountain regions alone hold more than half of global biodiversity hotspots, and an estimated 20% to 25% of the world's population depends on freshwater originating in mountain systems, precisely the assets an expanding bioeconomy increasingly seeks to conserve, monitor or use.
Researchers Stop Short of Calling It a Fix
The authors are careful not to present a more inclusive bioeconomy framework as a proven solution. They note the approach is still developing and not yet operating at a scale that would show whether it can resolve longstanding rights and participation issues, a caution that lines up with the broader push to build biodiversity reporting standards that can actually be verified. Their core finding is narrower: national strategies built primarily around technology, resources and economic development may be incomplete as commercial activity expands into areas where ownership, access and benefit-sharing are more complicated. The paper calls for stronger partnerships with local communities, better data, and greater institutional and financial support, recommendations that for businesses entering these markets are likely to become harder to separate from the technologies and resources generating the investment in the first place.
