Sabotage within the EU bioeconomy: Innovation, restriction and rival trajectories

Expanding the EU bioeconomy involves disputes over which uses of biological resources should develop and who may govern them. Firms and business associations can promote new materials and greater biomass use while seeking to restrict rival uses and public authority. Drawing on Nitzan and Bichler's account of strategic sabotage, this article traces how firms seek to protect particular business trajectories through these restrictions. It reconstructs five coalition programmes from the European Commission's 2025 bioeconomy consultation, reading recurring demands shared across submissions together to establish what each programme promotes, restricts and protects. In the industrial and forest programmes, the analysis identifies 18 documented attempts at sabotage. Twelve concern rival trajectories within the bioeconomy, two target fossil alternatives alone and four seek to restrict a governing capacity without naming a rival. Through demands concerning product classification, environmental calculation, regulation and resource allocation, firms and associations seek to protect bio-based markets and wood mobilisation and narrow how others may govern their development. These findings locate sabotage within programmes promoting bioeconomy innovation: the struggle concerns which trajectories may expand and which alternatives and whose authority firms seek to curtail.