Title: Governing the sustainability transition towards a circular economy of eco-industrial parks: a conceptual model for the role of management agencies of industrial estates

Authors: Yannis Mouzakitis

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, Rio, 265 00, Greece

Abstract: The transformation of existing industrial parks towards a more sustainable form is the subject of a significant number of policy plans in all industrialised countries. One of the main directions of this transition is the concept of 'eco-industrial park', where individual firms cooperate with each other and with the local community, in order to develop symbiotic schemes (based on exchanges of material, energy and wastes) and achieve increased environmental and economic performance. We see the transformation of conventional industrial estates towards an eco-industrial form as a sustainability transition, where a broad range of actors is expected to cooperate, and we focus on the role of the park management agency, which importance has been stressed in the related literature. Towards this end, we develop a conceptual framework which seeks to describe its role in the transition, and we discuss its basic building blocks (tasks and interventions, risks and barriers, drivers and catalysts) from an organisational and interventionist perspective.

Keywords: sustainability management; sustainability transition; circular economy; eco-industrial parks; industrial ecology; industrial symbiosis; industrial estates.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDSRM.2017.090386

International Journal of Decision Sciences, Risk and Management, 2017 Vol.7 No.3, pp.219 - 231

Received: 18 Jul 2017
Accepted: 28 Oct 2017
Published online: 13 Mar 2018 *

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