Editors 

Eduardo Corbelle Rico eduardo.corbelle@usc.es  

Marco V. García Quintela marco.garcia.quintela@usc.es  

María Loureiro García maria.loureiro@usc.es 

Motivation 

 The future of the Planet and the Humanity is directly related to the ability to ensure environmentally sustainable conditions. To ensure the material transition of a finite-and polluting-based economy to another based on nature, the concept of Bioconomía is proposed as an open working area on innovation for the service of sustainability. This proposal needs to be formulated and built with many transdisciplinary components, some already developed for decades for example in the field of agro-ecology. 

In this context, the topics involved in Bioeconomics should account for identities, communities, people, cultures, memories, history, engineering, economics or heritage, with different but convergent approaches and methodologies. Such perspective should be taken in order to investigate, know and measure activities that develop and affect the territory, the people who occupy it, how to organize and govern it, taking into account the dependence of the path, with the aim of contributing to design solutions for a Sustainable future. 

For this Special issue of Sémata, we propose a practical exercise of transdisciplinarity with very different approaches formulated to face a problem: management of peripheral territories-economically and politically preferably located in European regions, being important a comparative perspective among different territories in similar situations. The research question is how to contribute to better understand the relationship between quality of life in communities and their territories? What do we do with the territory? Territories in which it dominates the imbalance, abandonment, social disarticulation and, especially the lack of use of the vast natural,cultural and patrimonial resources that can serve to procure solutions with knowledge of the problems and the possibilities of innovation currently available. 

The number is organized in two blocks:

1) knowledge and diagnosis of the difficulties and capacities of the Territory as social space: demographic regression, depopulation, urban concentration and diffuse suburbanization,rural abandonment and forest fires, internal imbalances and formation of axes that concentrate power, advantages of the coasts,marine pollution,  emergence of a complex rural economy and productive spatial specialization, reduction of distances and dysfunction in the administrative and political organization of the Territory, tourism diffusion,patrimonial density and cultural innovation potential; Loss and strengths of identity and social cohesion. 

2) inquiry and evaluation of proposals and solutions applied in the framework of the bioeconomy. Identifying recognized social and productive capacities that could now become advantages (management of the Territory for organic agriculture,social management of common lands...) and promoting entrepreneurial attitudes and Ecoinnovation initiatives with rooted social and cultural base.