<p>Resilience and in particular resilience-oriented bioeconomy policies have become essential for dealing with long- and short-term stresses such as climate change, pandemics, and geopolitical conflicts. Meanwhile, concerns are growing about the resilience of the bioeconomy, but the scholarly attention given to the resilience orientation of bioeconomy policies worldwide has been limited. To fill this gap, we build on the concept of resilience, the Resilience Assessment Tool, and the new policy design approach to study whether bioeconomy policies enhance the resilience capacities of bio-based production systems, namely robustness, adaptability and transformability. Our systematic content analysis of 78 national bioeconomy policy documents from 50 countries shows that bioeconomic policies are characterized mainly by adaptability and transformability. Our descriptive statistical analyses indicate that these two resilience capacities and resilience orientation at large vary strongly and widely across documents. Our correlational analysis identifies political, economic, and environmental factors that begin to explain this strong cross-case variation. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of resilience in (bioeconomy) policy making and the strengths and weaknesses of bioeconomy policy designs with regard to the resilience capacities. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the design of inclusive and innovative policies that support sustainable solutions, ecological standards, and broad stakeholder involvement.</p>