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Across Europe and the OECD, the bioeconomy is promoted as that which will succeed the carbon economy: an economy based in 'the bio' that will be innovative, sustainable, responsible and environmentally friendly. Yet how to critically approach an economy justified not only by its accumulative potentials but also its ability to do and be good? This paper suggests the concept of 'the good economy' as an analytical tool for investigating how economic practice is entangled in versions of the good. Building upon the classic contributions of Weber, Thompson and Foucault in combination with valuation studies, this paper shows how the good economy concept can be employed to examine how the economic and the good are intertwined. Empirically, the paper teases out how what is made to be good in the bioeconomy is radically different than in economies of the recent past. While 'the good economy' of the early oil and aquaculture economy concerned how to insert this economy into society in a good manner, society is surprisingly absent in the contemporary bioeconomy. The bioeconomy is enacted as an expert issue, pursued by the tools of economic valuation, and based in the unquestioned idea that 'the bio' makes any economy good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of renewable energy is one manifestation of current transformations in the organisation of European energy production and markets. To illuminate the changes triggered by renewable energy policy, the evolution of solar photovoltaic policy in France is analysed with a focus on its central instrument, feed-in tariffs (FITs). FITs for photovoltaics raised difficulties in many countries, but their effects were particularly dramatic in France. Market sociology and science and technology studies are employed to describe FITs as agencements organising the markets and politics of electricity production. FITs are considered as inherently unpredictable insofar as they encourage innovation and the emergence of new actors. The ways in which three successive agencements of FITs for photovoltaics framed the politics and economy of photovoltaics in France, and how they addressed unanticipated effects, are discussed. This is suggestive of transformations and tensions in the construction of French energy policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]