Frank Boons

The University of Manchester · Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI)

The paper sets out to enrich the emerging debate on ‘deep’, transversal transitions. It does so by drawing attention to socio-economic developments neglected in the Deep Transition (DT) framework of Kanger and Schot, such as marketization, labour contracts becoming more individual and precarious, and changing human beliefs, aspirations, needs and w...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about debates on rethinking food and other socio-technical systems. While swiftly re-establishing normality has understandable appeal in a crisis, the landscape-level changes during the pandemic also hold windows of opportunity to "build back better" and to achieve sustainability transitions. In this article, we as...

Responsible innovation has emerged as a field of research dedicated to introduce sensitivity to societal values in innovation processes. However, much of the academic literature on RI deals with single technologies instead of technological systems and is future-orientated without explicitly using specialised knowledge of past developments. In this...

In the emergent literature, food ‘on-the-go’ (OTG) tends to be addressed as a consumption trend. However, considering that it entails significant amounts of packaging and food waste and has seen enormous growth in the UK since the 1990s, it is not sufficiently understood how OTG emerged as a sector. Conceptualising OTG as a provisioning practice an...

The Circular Economy (CE) concept has received immense traction among various stakeholders. This study aims to provide an assessment of its evolution and its positioning amidst “competing” concepts in the academic discourse. We do so by a mixed-methods approach combining text mining (topic modelling on CE literature) and Delphi study with 68 intern...

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic provides an empirical testing ground for assessing the impact of critical events on societal transitions. Such events are typically seen as exogenous to the transition process, an assumption which is investigated in this paper. Using a qualitative system dynamics modelling approach we conceptualize transition pathways as...

Measures that integrate social, economic and ecologic land use functions have increasingly raised the interest of scholars and practitioners concerned with sustainability. However, achieving effective integration involves important governance challenges. One challenge is that actors need to work across social, cognitive and physical boundaries. Thi...

Practices of production and consumption shape the ways in which societies currently perform in terms of sustainability. The way we conceptualize these practices has an effect on the options we can conceive for changing them to improve their sustainability. This chapter argues that the currently dominant framing of production and consumption in term...

• The Covid-19 crisis and the response of ‘lockdown’ has globally disrupted the normality of everyday lives, resulting in people abstaining from previous practices, or altering and substituting them; they also learn and adapt to new practices and ways to coordinate and organize everyday lives within the home (page 12). • Understanding the impacts o...

Circular Economy has gained immense popularity for its perceived capacity to operationalise sustainable development. However, a comprehensive long-term understanding of the concept, characterising its evolution in academic literature, has not yet been provided. As a first step, we apply unsupervised topic models on academic articles to identify pat...

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power...

Narratives are comprised of stories that provide insight into social processes. To facilitate the analysis of narratives in a more efficient manner, natural language processing (NLP) methods have been employed in order to automatically extract information from textual sources, e.g., newspaper articles. Existing work on automatic narrative extractio...

Drawing on Theories of Practice, we develop a process-oriented conceptualization of business models that resonates with the original formulation of sustainable development as a process.

Sustainable business model innovation is about creating superior customer and firm value by addressing societal and environmental needs through the way business is done. Business models require intentional design if they are to deliver aspired sustainability impacts. Scant research has been done on 'ecologies' of different business models in order...

The fragmented academic literature on sharing modes of provision deals with a diversity of initiatives ranging from for-profit business models to commoning initiatives. This literature mainly deals with individual instances, implicitly assuming that the sharing economy comes about by multiplying such initiatives. In this paper we argue that the tra...

For some time, China has engaged in durable governmental facilitation of the development of Sustainable Industrial Parks (SIPs). This has materialized through two policy programs: one stimulating Eco-industrial Parks (EIPs)and one advancing Circular Economy Industrial Parks(CEIPs). Given their overlapping objectives, we conceive of the interaction...

Current attempts to improve the ecological and social impact of production and consumption practices build on the recognized relevance of business models. Business models are distinct ways of coordinating the provision of goods and services, and they affect the ecological impact and social sustainability of the technologies underlying that provisio...

Business model innovation for sustainability is about creating superior customer and firm value by addressing societal and environmental needs through the way business is done. Business models require intentional design if they are to deliver aspired sustainability impacts. Business model design and assessment tools are needed to capture the effect...

Industrial symbiosis (IS), one of the founding notions within the field of industrial ecology, has diffused throughout significant parts of the world as a practice that can reduce the ecological impact of the industrial processes of groups of firms. In this article, we propose a fresh look at this research topic, building on the considerable advanc...

Industrial symbiosis activities show considerable diversity across social contexts. Within the boundaries of Europe alone, substantial differences exist in the ways that industrial symbiosis manifests itself. This variability presents challenges to define and identify the phenomena in the context of an internationally comparative study. This chapte...

In the literature on collaborative governance, it is often assumed that collaborative capacity (i.e., the ability of actors to coordinate their activities around public issues in a collaborative fashion) is primarily generated during the collaborative process itself. In this article, we show that collaborative capacity can already emerge before the...

This book covers updated perspectives on eco-industrial parks across the world. It is an excellent work done by researchers with different background and culture. History, barriers, institutional arrangements, policies, waste management, and greenhouse gas emissions, together with eco-industrial parks, are all discussed so that decision makers from...

One way to achieve more sustainable spatial development and deal with pressures on space is through integrated or multifunctional land use. Achieving effective integration, although attractive, presents governance challenges. One challenge is how to deal with boundaries. Actors from different backgrounds need to coordinate across and manage their b...

In spite of many observations that governmental policy exerts significant influence on the development of Sustainable Industrial Clusters (SIC), such policy dynamics have not been systemically investigated, and policy durability as one of its important dimensions has been neglected thus far. This study aims to reveal the processes that are needed t...

It has been long recognized in the conceptual literature that industrial symbiosis requires a perspective that focuses on long-term evolution. This has not yet been matched by adopting an adequate process-oriented research methodology. This article provides the underpinnings for such a methodology, presents a developed methodology, event sequence a...

The normative question “what role should governmental policy play to facilitate the development of industrial symbiosis?” has received considerable attention of researchers. However, for several reasons the effects of governmental policy actions on industrial symbiosis are still not clear. This article proposes a research agenda to clarify the mech...

Systems integration is a strategy advocated in order to achieve sustainable development. However, in the literature, it is poorly conceptualized, and current research fails to address systems integration as a process of change. This paper proposes a conceptual framework and operationalization for assessing processes of systems integration. This inc...

This article argues that direct ecological impact needs to be incorporated into research on organizations and the natural environment, as complementary to conceptualizations of ecological impact as a social construction. Building on work in analytical sociology, it proposes to study socio-ecological mechanisms and thus enhance the understanding of...

The paper presents ongoing research performed by a network of European researchers on the development and diffusion of industrial symbiosis in European countries. The research has a number of aims: 1. To find out the nature of industrial symbiosis by finding out the national peculiarities as well as points of correspondence in countries with varyin...

The aim of this paper is to advance research on sustainable innovation by adopting a business model perspective. Through a confrontation of the literature on both topics we find that research on sustainable innovation has tended to neglect the way in which firms need to combine a value proposition, the organization of the upstream and downstream va...

The chapter presents an overview of research on the way in which global companies deal with their ecological impact in relation to the theory of ecological modernization. The study of global companies and the connections they provide among national economies is presented as contributing to a deeper understanding of the extent to which national econ...

This paper introduces a holistic approach to the study of sustainable development of global product chains. We first present a number of perspectives on this topic from disciplines such as economic geography, management science, sociology and environmental sciences. Each of these approaches brings in a specific focus: the consequences of geographic...

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions and market opportunity structures in consuming countrie...

In 2008 I published a critique of Pierre Desrochers‘ early work on industrial by-product exchanges; Desrochers has now written a reply, and this is my rejoinder. Studying by-product exchanges among firms in relation to the reduction of ecological impact of economic activities is not served by drawing them into a contest to verify a hypothesis about...

The question of how to organize collaborative problem solving efforts when collective action is necessary has received considerable attention in the scientific literature. However, many such contributions neglect the role of the governance system in which processes evolve. These systems are complex, and the actors involved have a high degree of sel...

One assumption underlying the work on industrial symbiosis (IS) is that certain social conditions must be fulfilled in order for firms to develop symbiotic linkages. In this article we add depth to this insight by using institutional capacity as an underlying concept for these conditions, and we propose that such capacity influences IS by altering...

Industrial ecology (IE) is an ensemble concept that specifies ways in which firms can and are currently starting to deal with their environmental impact. Life-cycle assessments (LCAs) have become familiar elements of public discourse and environmental management. Self-organization, selfgovernance, governments setting conditions, external control ca...

Our group has been together for over 18 months and in this period we had two 2,5 day workshops. As our purpose is to develop a comparative analysis of industrial symbiosis in Europe, we have found that a major challenge is to find common denominators (the object of study) while leaving room for diversity on other characteristics (which is why we th...

There is increasing evidence that throughout the world, firms, governmental agencies and NGOs are seeking to stimulate industrial symbiosis. This concept and its application have also been the topic of extensive research. Up till now, this work lacks a more comprehensive theoretical framework, and this paper fills this gap. We provide a theoretical...

Our group has been together for over 18 months and in this period we had two 2,5 day workshops. As our purpose is to develop a comparative analysis of industrial symbiosis in Europe, we have found that a major challenge is to find common denominators (the object of study) while leaving room for diversity on other characteristics (which is why we th...

If one were to put on your desk two words, “green economy”, what would your first take on this be? My reaction: an economy that produces goods and services for human consumption by respecting nature and harnessing its potential efficiently, without causing damage. A quick literature review reveals this is partly true. According to UNEP, a green eco...

Humans as scientists and managers often draw on metaphors to help describe and understand the complex issues they observe or manage. As human activities begin to bump up against the constraints set by natural systems there is a tendency to search for metaphors from natural science - biomimicy or industrial ecology - have been around for some time n...

Airports increasingly are contested areas where many sustainability aspects are relevant. Especially in cases where airport development and urban development coincide, the actors involved are engaged in decision-making processes where only a small subset of the broader scope of sustainability issues is discussed. In this article we use a conceptual...

Biofuels as a renewable source of energy have gained considerable importance in recent years. The use of biofuels is expected to rise since national governments of developed nations like the US and European countries see it as one of the ways to fulfill climate targets and increase the security in their energy supply. Production of biofuels is also...

This article analyzes traffic management as an example of infrastructure operation and assesses to what extent the transition approach as developed by Rotmans, Geels, and others is helpful in providing insight and contributes to the transition of the mobility system. Based on a conceptual framework which draws on the work of Luhmann and Critical Sy...

The article seeks to examine how socioeconomic conditions influence the shaping of a system dealing with waste of electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Waste from EEE is a rapidly developing global problem. The enlarged production and consumption of electronic products leads to an increased volume of waste, and the toxicity of waste component...

In this article we critically discuss the different perspectives that are currently in use for assessing the relationship between ecological and economic performance. Based on a review of the literature we propose that research up till now has made use of four distinct system boundaries: the firm, markets, production and consumption systems, and ec...

Most work on industrial ecology continues to emphasize its roots in engineering and the technological sciences. This book differs in that it explores the social context of industrial ecology and presents empirical work addressing how cognitive, cultural, political and structural mechanisms condition the emergence and operation of industrial ecology...

A major claim of the work of Desrochers is that students of industrial ecology can learn a great deal from historical evidence on industrial practices regarding waste recovery. In this article, I argue that this requires that such evidence should be put into its institutional context, to prevent overly simple conclusions and naive policy prescripti...

It is by no means a new idea that the world we live in is an interconnected one. Centuries before Castells’ seminal trilogy ‘The Information Age’, various European philosophers adopted a systemic view in order to explain certain physical and social phenomena. The 1950s were the heyday of total systems thinking: the idea that everything is connected...

Industrial ecology is a rapidly developing field of research and practice in which the sustainability of industrial systems is thought to be improved through closing of material and energy loops among firms. In this paper, I look at the developing practice around this concept from a self-organization perspective. A central question is the extent to...

The dissemination and implementation of the Industrial Symbiosis projects in the Rotterdam Harbour and Industry Complex can be characterised by break-through projects on the basis of long-term industrial ecology projects. The first 4-year Industrial Symbiosis programme started in 1994 and generated the basis for 15 projects that were further develo...

A main reason for the persistence of current water pollution lies in the diffuse character of many of its sources. For a large part such diffuse pollution is related to the production, use and waste of various kinds of products. For the reduction of this pollution, a product-oriented policy strategy, based on interaction with stakeholders could be...

Industrial ecology is a label under which many linkages between production and consumption processes are grouped. This article is based on a social science approach, ranging from organisational learning to the analysis of industrial districts, in reflection to the techno-economic approach of the developments in the industrial ecology projects ‘INES...

Industrial ecology is a label under which many linkages between production and consumption processes are grouped. This article is based on a social science approach, ranging from organisational learning to the analysis of industrial districts, in reflection to the techno-economic approach of the developments in the industrial ecology projects ‘INES...

This paper argues that the sustainable development of production and consumption systems requires the adoption of a systems view by firms and their stakeholders. This perspective enables them to develop and implement through dialogue a vision that takes systemic change as a focus. At the level of individual firms, employing such a systems view requ...

Diminishing the ecological effects of products has become an important focus of corporate environmental strategies. Based on empirical research by the author and published sources, this paper presents a conceptual framework of six types of product chain management. By looking at several categories of costs and benefits for different actors (supplie...

The literature study on which we report here is based on a cross-disciplinary database containing around 650 articles, taken from the engineering, management, and policy studies disciplines. We report on this literature using a model distinguishing between the product development processes as such, and different contexts, such as the company as a w...

In several industrialised countries, there have occurred initiatives to establish eco-industrial parks. Originally, these were mainly based upon the exchange of resources between heavy industries in industrial complexes. These initiatives are generally referred to with the concepts of industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial parks. Since then, the c...

The concept of industrial ecology focuses on groups of firms and their stakeholders that interact to achieve sustainable development. This article presents a dynamic approach to the interaction within such networks of organizations. The literature on networks and group dynamics provides us with contradicting views on the extent to which learning is...

Through their activities, organizations have an impact upon the natural environment. When organizational members and stakeholders perceive this impact as problematic, organizations are motivated to develop routines to deal with it. In this article, we argue that the emergence and diffusion of these routines provide a rich empirical testing ground f...

In the Netherlands. there has been an ongoing effort by business firms and government organizations to deal with the ecological impact of industrial activities. Over the years. the set of organizational routines that firms employ to deal with their ecological impact is changing. In this article, we analyze first of all the change in this set of rou...

The concept of translation captures the essence of the way in which innovative ideas diffuse to organizations: rather than being transplanted in the same way in every organization, the idea is reformulated into a shape that fits the adapting organization. For instance, pollution prevention, which consists of a conceptual framework as well as a set...

Taking a recent column by Braden Allenby in this journal as a starting point, we argue the need for researchers in the field of industrial ecology to reflect upon its normative aspects. We argue that the field will advance through an explicit discourse on such issues as epistemological positions, the inherent normative nature of using metaphors, an...

Relations between a firm and organizations in its political and economic environment are increasingly seen as crucial for the successful functioning of that firm, both in the narrow economic sense, and at the broader level of reaching sustainability. However, attention seems to be focused on the positive qualities of such networks of organizations....

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Industrial ecology initiatives have in common the fact that they cross company boundaries, necessitating the coordination of the activities of several economic actors. This article focusses on this coordination problem. Based on organizational sociological concepts, four types of industrial ecology activities are distinguished. Each has its own cha...