Abstract
Identifying the most relevant environment related indicators and how to make them available to decision-makers are current issues. Some seek to enhance their efficiency by means of methods such as aggregations or weighting. More fundamentally, in this chapter we question how industrial ecologists appropriate the notion of environment. On the basis of multidisciplinary research, we argue that, in contexts of geographically bounded networks of social actors forging industrial synergies, environmental questions should be posed from the viewpoint of the actors. Our work might aid to operationalize the complex notion of environment in such contexts, and constitutes a call to develop anthropocentric approaches to defining environmental indications followed by appropriated indicators.
Highlights
I.e., the field of study focusing on the relations between industrial systems and their environments, an increasing amount of indicators and methods are proposed in order to assess consequences of those industrial systems on the environment [1]
In industrial ecology we study the functioning of industrial system and their interaction with the environment
That is what we concluded in the previous section regarding the conception of the environment in industrial ecology, i.e., a technocentric or a biocentric environment, can be far from what people perceive as their environment
Summary
I.e., the field of study focusing on the relations between industrial systems and their environments, an increasing amount of indicators and methods are proposed in order to assess consequences of those industrial systems on the environment [1]. Policy-makers may encounter difficulties grasping the tangibility and meaning of such a wide range of indicators [1]. Is that because the environment is too complex to be understood by actors? Rather the environmental indications (via indicators) do not meet the actors’ representation of the environment? When ex-ante environmental indications are supposed to serve decision-making processes, policy-makers are required to understand such indications. Our goal here is to decrypt, on the one hand the current epistemological basis of the environmental issue in industrial ecology, and on the other hand how it should eventually be amended, so that it meets requirements of networks of social actors
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