Production-consumption Systems Research Articles

Crescer decrescendo

ABSTRACT To justify the thesis under the motto “growing by decreasing,” this paper presents three arguments. First, the evolution of ideas about tackling the environmental side effects of economic growth went from “limits to growth” to the unifying concept of “beyond-growth,” with “green growth” and “degrowth” as two poles of the recent debate. Second, there are indications of important convergences regarding policy prescriptions in any “green strategy.” Third, some clues suggest that, despite the convergences, the main challenge is overcoming the inertia in production-consumption systems by destabilizing the dominant configuration and inducing a change in consumers’ preferences.

System confluence and the reinvention of automobility.

The aim of the paper is to provide a longitudinal account of the emergence and stabilization of the automobility system and to assess the contemporary state of the system in the early stages of an ongoing sustainability transition. The production, use, and disposal of cars, in a pervasive global automobility system, are examined to reveal and explain the growing sustainability significance of overlaps with other systems. System-to-system confluence to varying degrees is ongoing with electricity, housing, aerospace, and information, software, and communications systems. The interfaces between multiple systems are evidenced by contestation for legitimacy via technological innovation and organizational experimentation. The result is uncertainty among key actors and stakeholders, institutional reforms, diverse corporate strategies, and emergent societal practices and behaviors. The paper thereby provides a contextualized account of the tension between barriers to change that may preserve the coherence of the automobility system and differential boundary effects arising from the impact of other production-consumption systems that may result in regime fragmentation. Confluence with other systems may resolve some sustainability contradictions but will also create new ones. Appeal to sustainability science will be key to evaluating how far existing sustainability problems will be resolved, and how far new ones will emerge in the automobility transition.

How policies and actor strategies affect electric vehicle diffusion and wider sustainability transitions.

Implementing electromobility is a central component in the de-carbonization of personal mobility. In recent years, the absolute number of electric vehicles (EVs) and their market share has increased sharply in many countries. This paper focuses on Norway, a pioneer market for EVs that other countries can learn from. The analysis highlights how a combination of local and national policies over a 30-y period, which targeted both industry development and vehicle demand, were important drivers of this development. It also highlights the importance of advocacy groups and strong networks in promoting EVs, as well as changes in user preferences. The paper demonstrates how the EV diffusion has been driven by alignments of multiple processes across different levels, involving interactions between multiple actors and social groups with different interests and views about desirable futures as described by the multi-level perspective (MLP). Building on the MLP, the study of EV diffusion in Norway illustrates how niches are often sustained through demonstrations, experimentation, strategic alliances, and actors securing favorable political and economic conditions. Further, it shows how local or national niches may depend on international regime actors, such as the car manufacturing industry and policies developed abroad. The paper also explores how the introduction of EVs has opened for wider effects, including innovation within production-consumption systems beyond mobility. Based on this analysis, we argue for a nuanced perspective on the relationship between incremental, regime-internal innovation, and wider transformative changes, where the merits of societal learning and experience with battery electricity for transportation are highlighted.

The emerging role of mega-urban regions in the sustainability of global production-consumption systems

Mega-urban regions (MURs) are important consumers or traders of resources from, or producers of wastes destined for, the global hinterlands. These roles, coupled with their concentration, clustering and centrality effects, mean MURs have a disproportionately large effect on the sustainability of global production-consumption systems (PCSs). Actions taken within MURs influence the sustainability of global PCSs, and vice versa; but that influence is complicated by complex governance intersections. Three cases are used to illustrate governance innovation in MUR-PCS interactions: industrial symbiosis in Tianjin, China; electricity production in London, UK; and the adoption of standards and labels for seafood in Bangkok, Thailand. In London and Tianjin, waste capture reduced consumption of hinterland resources, whereas in Bangkok, the aim was to improve the sustainability of resource use in coastal and marine hinterlands. We suggest an agenda for research to evaluate the potential for transferrable MUR governance innovation to enable sustainable and equitable PCSs.

Product destruction: Exploring unsustainable production-consumption systems and appropriate policy responses

The practice of product destruction, whereby retailers or manufacturers dispose of viable consumer products such as unsold goods or customer returns, is an extreme expression of the linearity of our current production-consumption system. This qualitative exploratory study aims to uncover why companies engage in this highly unsustainable and resource-inefficient behaviour and to explore the potential policy interventions required to effectively address the issue. In-depth interviews were conducted with eleven experts from the textiles and electronics sectors to understand the driving forces behind this practice and provide a bottom-up perspective on appropriate policy interventions. The research identified two distinct sets of factors that contribute to product destruction. Upstream factors influence overall levels of customer returns and unsold stock and primarily include aspects of the retailer's business model, consumer expectations and product design. Downstream factors drive companies to dispose of these products rather than to pursue product life-extension strategies such as repair and reuse. Key downstream factors include economic incentives, profit-margin considerations, liability and brand integrity concerns, the availability of reuse networks and management issues. Consequently, to meaningfully address product destruction, a policy mix is required to simultaneously target upstream and downstream factors and change the behaviour of different actors, from manufacturers and retailers to consumers and reuse organisations.

Conceptualizing the Transnational Regulation of Plastics: Moving Towards a Preventative and Just Agenda for Plastics

AbstractThis article categorizes and evaluates how regulatory regimes conceptualize plastics, and how such conceptualizations affect the production, consumption, and disposal of plastics. Taking a doctrinal and policy-oriented approach, it identifies four ‘frames’ – that is, four distinct and coherent sets of meanings attributed to plastics within transnational regulation – namely, plastics as waste to be managed; a material to be prevented; a good (or waste) to be traded freely; and inputs or outputs in production-consumption systems. Based on this analysis, three significant deficiencies in the transnational regulation of plastics are identified: the failure to frame plastics in terms of environmental justice and human rights issues; insufficient focus on plastics prevention (rather than management); and the role of law in reinforcing its production and consumption.

Trends of CRISPR technology development and deployment into Agricultural Production-Consumption Systems

Genome editing of food crops is emerging as a new tool to meet food and nutritional security in the current scenario of disproportionate balances between rising population and diminishing resources, further aggravated by global climate change. In recent years, several gene editing techniques have emerged, among which ‘CRISPR along with nucleases’ is proving to be the most versatile tool, representing tremendous potential and promise. While this technology is being deployed across various sectors like pharma and healthcare, early-stage research indicates its potential for application in the agricultural R&D. The purpose of current study is to assess trends of this emerging technology in agricultural production-consumption systems using literature and patents as indicators. Data retrieved through literature and patents revealed its vast potential and possibility of a fast diffusion across the sub-sectors of agricultural PCS along with a promise of new product development for rapid market entry.

農産物直売所を核とした地産地消の展開と地域農業振興(テーマ:地産地消と地域農業振興,2006年度大会シンポジウム報告)

農産物直売所を核とした地産地消の展開と地域農業振興(テーマ:地産地消と地域農業振興,2006年度大会シンポジウム報告)

青森県における地産地消の取り組み(テーマ:地産地消と地域農業振興,2006年度大会シンポジウム報告)

青森県における地産地消の取り組み(テーマ:地産地消と地域農業振興,2006年度大会シンポジウム報告)

Exploring Future Food Provision Scenarios for China.

Developing sustainable food systems is essential, especially for emerging economies, where food systems are changing rapidly and affect the environment and natural resources. We explored possible future pathways for a sustainable food system in China, using multiple environmental indicators linked to eight of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Forecasts for 2030 in a business as usual scenario (BAU) indicate increases in animal food consumption as well as increased shortages of the land available and the water needed to produce the required food in China. Associated greenhouse gas emissions and nitrogen and phosphorus losses could become 10-42% of global emissions in 2010. We developed three main pathways besides BAU [produce more and better food (PMB), consume and waste less food (CWL), and import more food (IMF)] and analyzed their impacts and contributions to achieving one or more of the eight SDGs. Under these scenarios, the demand for land and water and the emissions of GHG and nutrients may decrease by 7-55% compared to BAU, depending on the pathway followed. A combination of PMB and CWL was most effective, while IMF externalizes impacts to countries exporting to China. Modestly increasing feed or food imports in a selective manner could ease the pressure on natural resources. Our modeling framework allows us to analyze the effects of changes in food production-consumption systems in an integrated manner, and the results can be linked to the eight SDGs. Despite formidable technological, social, educational, and structural barriers that need to be overcome, our study indicates that the ambitious targets of China's new agricultural and environmental strategy appear to be achievable.

What It Takes to Lead Sustainability Transitions from the Bottom-Up: Strategic Interactions of Grassroots Ecopreneurs

This paper studies features of grassroots ecopreneurs’ leadership in their attempt to ignite transformations in production-consumption systems from the bottom up. It builds on a comprehensive approach of change agency based on institutional work, innovation, and learning intermediation literature. The paper describes grassroots ecopreneurs’ interaction strategies to resource business models for sustainability. Empirical data comes from an action research project that consisted of implementing a sustainability experiment in Sur de Bolívar (Colombia). The experiment shows grassroots ecopreneurs’ arrays of activities around making sense, shaping, securing support, nurturing, expanding, and scaling the value proposition, the business infrastructure, the customer interface and the financial model of their ventures. Our findings suggest that leading businesses transition into a more sustainable field requires grassroots ecopreneurs acting as change agents by performing a diverse array of boundary, practice, and knowledge circulation strategies, aiming at securing the societal and environmental impact of their ventures. Change agency manifests in the ways ecopreneurs maneuver to bring about transformations and strive to sustain it. The study contributes to a better understanding of processes of socio-technical change for sustainability in highly diverse institutional contexts, such as (but not exclusively) the developing world. An agency-based approach is proposed as an alternative to a managerial approach.

Rethinking Food Security in Mexico: Discussing the Need for Sustainable Transversal Policies Linking Food Production and Food Consumption

Two of the biggest challenges of humanity are to achieve global food security by reducing environmental impacts, and provide healthy diets for all people. In this paper, we discuss the complexity involved in designing solutions on food security. We focus on Mexico due to the heterogeneity of the country in relation to socioeconomic, cultural and ecological factors. First, we discuss the need to analyze food security by integrating the sustainability of both food production and food consumption. Then we describe the Mexican situation by analyzing five food production-consumption systems that illustrate the diversity of agricultural systems and dietary patterns. This analysis reveals that the pathway to achieve food security in Mexico should include sustainable food production systems and dietary patterns. The solution should be site-specific considering the ecological, socioeconomic and cultural situation, so an integrative geographical perspective is needed with a bottom-up approach; in this way, food security for future generation will not be compromised. To reach this, transversal policies involving the agricultural, health, environmental and federal agencies are required.

Circular economy as an essentially contested concept

The Circular Economy (CE) is currently a popular notion within the policy and business advocacy groups. Despite being visionary and provocative in its message, the research on the CE concept is emerging. The two intertwined objectives of the paper are; first to identify, discuss and develop the various definitions provided by the emerging literature. Secondly, to suggest an initial research approach with which research on CE can be conducted. Our analysis shows that the existing CE work is mainly done on the practical and technical levels of the actual physical flows of materials and energy in production-consumption systems. The focus of the extant literature is on concrete metrics, tools, instruments and computations. Therefore, the basic assumptions concerning the values, societal structures, cultures, underlying world-views and the paradigmatic potential of CE remain largely unexplored. We argue that CE has already become what Gallie (1955) more than six decades ago termed as an “essentially contested concept” (ECC). The paper further suggests a model for CE research that helps in the categorization, classification and organization of research and investigation on CE. The model can help in limiting the observed unbalance and enhance the contribution of the CE approach to a more sustainable global society.

The relations between ecological sustainability and geographical proximity: A review of the literature

Abstract Sustainability is often connected with proximity in order to expound and substantiate specific research results. The two concepts have been discussed extensively in the literature, while a deep analysis regarding the linkages between them, especially for the more recent literature, is missing. The current work addresses this gap and presents a systematic literature review of 63 articles. Its main focus is on contributions around ecological sustainability from 2010 to 2015 containing explicit and latent connections to the concept of geographical proximity (GeP). Other forms of proximity are taken into account as well, especially in regard to their impact on the geographical dimension. The results are interpreted through a systems theory lens in order to allow for a discussion about the coordination of complex social systems. It is concluded that, although never a sufficient condition, GeP provides the basis for substantial sustainability-related change within current production–consumption systems.

Towards a coherent multi-level framework for resource accounting

With increasing resource scarcity and environmental impacts resulting from inefficient resource utilisation, accounting for resource consumption along the life cycle of a product or service becomes critical for designing production–consumption systems. This work aims at developing a coherent framework for resource accounting to support the evaluation of alternatives for production and consumption activities. The framework provides an understanding of resource utilisation at unit, process, inter-process and production–consumption levels within a system. The multilevel characteristic of this framework allows a comprehensive and holistic view of a system with the potential to reveal how decisions at one level would affect other levels of the system. Based on such a multilevel view, a unique adaptation of the Cumulative Exergy Resource Accounting method is proposed to quantify resource consumption associated with both technological and natural processes. This work also differentiates between and accounts for the operational resource consumption in resource extraction, agriculture and manufacturing and for the capital resource consumption for providing machinery and infrastructure. This is a practical framework for resource accounting that can be used by process engineers and local planners to support decision making regarding alternative system designs, gain insights on the performance of a production system and devise design options including retrofits for improving the overall resource efficiency of a system. By revealing the resource consumption through each system layer, the framework provides a robust and transparent way to capture effects of decision making during design or retrofitting of processes in order to find the most efficient design options. In addition, the framework can be applied to support research in other areas such as those addressing the social, cultural and business perspectives of resource management. Finally, a case study on the production and consumption of sugarcane ethanol is used to illustrate the features of the proposed framework. The framework proved useful in assessing the effects of design decisions at the various levels, such as choosing between molecular sieve and azeotropic distillation at the unit level, adoption of water recycling at the process level, and bagasse exchange flows at inter-process level. The proposed systematic approach has given insights into how changes in resource consumption occur at different levels.

Exploring the Potential of a German Living Lab Research Infrastructure for the Development of Low Resource Products and Services

Living Labs for Sustainable Development aim to integrate users and actors for the successful generation of low-resource innovations in production-consumption systems. This paper investigates potentials of and measures towards the realization of a German Living Lab infrastructure to support actor-integrated sustainability research and innovations in Germany. Information was primarily derived from extensive dialog with experts from the fields of innovation, sustainable development and the Living Lab community (operators, users, etc.), which was facilitated through interviews and workshops. A status quo analysis revealed that, generally, the sustainability and Living Lab communities are hardly intertwined. Twelve Living Labs that explicitly consider sustainability aspects were identified. The application fields “Living and Working”, “Town, Region and Mobility”, and “Retail and Gastronomy” were identified as particularly suitable for investigation in Living Labs and highly relevant in terms of resource efficiency. Based on the analyses of drivers and barriers and SWOT, keystones for the development of a research infrastructure for user integrated development of sustainable products and services were formulated. Suggested strategies and measures include targeted funding programs for actor-integrated, socio-technical research based on a Living Lab network, a communication campaign, and programs to foster networking and the inclusion of SMEs.

Social metabolism analysis using emergy

After studying ecosystems and biosphere function for decades, Howard T. Odum sketched a methodology for calculating the value of the biophysical resources of nature and also the products of human activity. The methodology of “emergy” or “solar energy previously added” measures the biophysical work embedded in processes that use geological and biological resources and also human labor. According to Odum, the economic value (price) and the biophysical value (work added) generally do not coincide, as the market ignores or does not consider all factors of production. This paper explains the analysis of production-consumption systems using the emergy and discusses its potential utility in sustainable regional planning.

Experience staging and symbolic knowledge: The case of Bornholm culinary products

The ongoing changes in Western food markets and the emergence of ‘alternative’ agri-food production–consumption systems have been conceptualized in numerous ways but very rarely in terms of an ‘experience turn’. This article applies the perspective offered by the concept of the experience economy and empirically analyses the development and marketing of culinary products from the Danish island of Bornholm as production-side activities in a larger ‘territorial staging system’ which at consumption-side primarily relates to urban consumers. A second analytical focus is on the knowledge aspects of experience-based economic activities. The knowledge aspects of the coordinated staging activities of Bornholm firms, business networks and governance actors are studied by use of the differentiated knowledge bases taxonomy, which includes a category of socio-cultural ‘symbolic’ knowledge, complementary to the technological and scientific types of knowledge important for developing functional assets of products. The data and analyses suggest that the experience economy perspective can enrich the research on alternative food production systems by directing attention to the crucial role of strategic, coordinated staging of experiences that reach the consumers in and outside the region. Second, the article shows that the innovation and staging of experience offerings and authenticity-based products relies on symbolic knowledge dynamics in creating and communicating commercially relevant cultural values and meanings and that the sources of such knowledge dynamics are not only local but to a large extent extra-regional and multi-scalar. These findings are indications of new opportunities, barriers and external linkages for rural areas.

Encouraging system learning in two poultry subsectors

This article contributes to the debate on participatory approaches to bring about system changes that support sustainability and other broad innovation challenges. We report on experiences of workshops in two Dutch poultry subsectors where actors from the value chains together with a few other actors and facilitated by researchers, conducted an analysis of the structural barriers and windows of opportunity for innovation. In this way, we investigate the value of these collective system analyses in a wider approach for system innovation towards sustainable animal sectors. We expected that they would stimulate system learning among the participants: i.e. (1) recognising the multi-causality of recurrent problems, (2) redefining barriers into opportunities, and (3) designing options for collective action. The participants indeed recognised the integral and complex nature of the sustainability issues, and their commitment to sustainable development increased. However, the learning was limited in the sense that they defined few innovation opportunities and no options for collective actions. After analysing whether the workshops actively challenged the innovation barriers in the current subsectors, we conclude that the latter two dimensions of system learning seem to have been hindered by the representation of a large part of the value chains in the workshops.Our experiences provide new insights on how to stimulate a learning process geared towards overcoming lock-in in the incumbent production–consumption systems. Collective system analyses can be a relevant additional method for participatory innovation approaches. The innovation system perspective broadens the scope of the system and helps to distinguish the structures underlying current unsustainable practices. We suggest not seeking completeness by trying to bring all relevant value chain actors to the table at the same time, but rather organising multiple workshops with both value chain actors and innovating actors who operate more independently from the dominant system.

Application of the MIPS method for assessing the sustainability of production–consumption systems of food

The article estimates the natural resource consumption due to nutrition from the supply and demand sides. Using the MIPS (Material Input per Service Unit) methodology, we analyzed the use of natural resources along the supply chains of three Italian foodstuffs: wheat, rice and orange-based products. These figures were then applied for evaluating the sustainability of diets in 13 European countries. The results outline which phases in food production are more natural resource demanding than others. We also observed different levels of sustainability in the European diets and the effect of different foodstuffs in the materials, water and air consumption.