The European bioeconomy has great potential to support climate, biodiversity, and development goals. Yet rural actors – farmers, SMEs, and local authorities – often face barriers to participation, from lack of knowledge to limited funding access. Four EU projects – RuralBioUp, SCALE-UP, BioRural, and MainstreamBIO – have released joint recommendations for an updated EU Bioeconomy Strategy. 

The four policy recommendations focus on empowering rural regions as key players in the bio-based transition:

Boosting Knowledge & Building Network: The new strategy should promote digital tools, micro-training programmes, and regional knowledge clusters. The goal: engage youth, women, and underrepresented groups – and move beyond scattered participation towards a "network of networks."

Empowering Producers: Farmers must become drivers of bio-based innovation. The strategy should support cooperatives, invest in local infrastructure (like biomass storage), and ensure transparency across value chains – helping producers benefit from bioeconomy markets.

Aligning Policies: Better alignment with the Green Deal, Common Agricultural Policy, and Circular Economy Action Plan is key. This includes clear EU-wide definitions, simplified by-product classifications, and joint planning tools across sectors.

Unlocking Funding: Innovation in rural areas often fails due to financing barriers. The strategy should enable micro-grants, blended finance, regional investment hubs, and easier access to funding – especially for SMEs and pilot-scale innovations.

This policy paper builds on the collective knowledge generated by the four EU projects, all of which are actively engaged in supporting rural bioeconomy development across Europe. The evidence underpinning each thematic section of this policy paper stems from a wide array of project activities and stakeholder engagements implemented in the period 2022-2025 and collected across multiple regions and countries. Each project applied context-specific methodologies to identify challenges, gather evidence, and formulate policy recommendations.