Towards a circular forest bioeconomy: the road travelled and the challenges of territorial implementation

International audience; The circular economy (CE) and the bioeconomy (BE) are two concepts seeking to address sustainabilityissues. They were both developed over the last decades based on new approaches to the relationshipsbetween the economy and the environment which, in particular, propose alternatives to current lineareconomic models based on resource extraction. Although institutional efforts seek to promote commonframeworks, the combination of these two concepts with shifting contours produces a complex nebula ofinterpretations, where the least ambitious conceptions of sustainability dominate, benefitting from theseambiguities.From our perspective, there is an ongoing need to clarify the criteria defining a sustainable circularbioeconomy (CBE) as well as its goals and how strategies seeking to foster its implementation contribute toreaching them. This clarification requires an approach grounded into sectoral and regional specificities. Wefocus on the forest sector and investigate the challenges inherent to the assessment and implementation ofa sustainable forest circular bioeconomy (FCBE) at the territorial scale.In this article, our general aim is to clarify how BE and CE have been conceptualised and operationalised inacademic research focused on the forest sector. Our first specific objective is to present a quantifiedoverview of the scientific literature, and to identify the different definitions of the concepts used, how theyrelate to one another, and to document how they have been (and are being) developed across several(un)related research clusters and disciplines. Second, the systematic analysis of the literature draws ourattention to two specific, transversal questions which, in our view, need to be specifically addressed, andwhich we investigate by performing a more in-depth, narrative reading of the corpus of retrievedpublications. These two issues concern (1) the insufficient accounting for the spatial dimension of the forestCBE, particularly at the territory scale and (2) the need to clarify how sustainability assessments of the FCBEshould be performed, especially in a context of transition.