The bioeconomy (BE) has gained increasing attention in research and policy debates over the last two decades. It has been intensively discussed and implemented in the EU and North America at the beginning of the Millennium. Since then, BE has become an increasingly debated subject across the globe, attracting also the political interest of a diversity of actors in Asia, South America, and Africa. The concept proposes using bio-based resources as a partial substitute for fossil-based resources sustaining the global economy. Hence, it is frequently suggested as a key part of the solution for major challenges of our times, namely climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity. At the same time, the BE's promise to decouple economic growth and national competitiveness from carbon emissions and resource throughput speaks to the challenge that economic growth has so far been linked to (increasing) resource overuse and emissions and that this link must be broken to guarantee a livable future for all sectors of societies across the globe (Eversberg et al., 2023; Mastini et al., 2021; Pavone and Goven, 2017; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., 2022). However, different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the bioeconomy concept have emerged over the last decades worldwide (Kleinschmit et al., 2014). Pülzl et al. recognized ten years ago that the meaning of BE seems to be in constant flux (Pülzl et al., 2014), and this seems to have not changed in the meantime. The Global Bioeconomy Report for 2020 acknowledges that the term “bioeconomy” has been incorporated into various policy strategies, but a universally accepted definition is still lacking. This is not necessarily problematic, given the variety of political and spatial settings in which the BE is being discussed and applied. Yet the concept of the BE has become more comprehensive and complex, if not increasingly ambivalent (and contested), because of the multiple visions of societal change that its different definitions tend to embody (Teitelbaum et al., 2020).