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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
In the same realm as social ecology, industrial ecology and the circular economy, a new interdisciplinary field is growing: territorial ecology. Based on the analysis of the metabolism of human societies at a local level, it helps us diagnose a socioecosystem. This diagnostic is not only based on what is circulating, but also on how it is organized and why. Who is at the origin of a flow? What are their motivations? Who has the power to make decisions about it?
This methodology, taking into account both the material description of human societies and the analysis of decisionmaking processes, might also be relevant for territorial diagnostics. It leads us to a systemic view of the consequences of individual and collective actions on the sustainability of local socio ecosystems.
Socio-ecological transition implies a substantial evolution of human societies. Innovation, be it technological, organizational or social, is intrinsically involved in this evolution. However, if transition calls for disruptive rather than incremental innovations, we must also assess these innovations with a systemic view of their consequences.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Positioning Territorial Ecology in the Scientific and Institutional Context
1.1. Positioning of territorial ecology from a scientific point of view
1.2. Positioning in the institutional context
1.3. Conclusion
2 Main Methodologies Developed Around Urban and Territorial Metabolism: Contributions and Limitations
2.1. The main principles of metabolism
2.2. The rise of social metabolism and the territorial footprint
2.3. Contributing to better knowledge of territorial issues
2.4. Conclusion
3 A Wealth Creation Approach for a Territorial Diagnosis Methodology
3.1. The model of wealth creation subsystems
3.2. Methods of analysis of the relationships between stakeholders within the territorial metabolism
3.3. Conclusion
4 Territorial Ecology and the Challenges of the Socio-ecological Transition: Metabolism, Capacity and Resilience
4.1. Capabilities
4.2. Better integration of the relationship to the environment within the metabolism
4.3. Territorial capability and resilience: a means to tackle transition issues
4.4. Conclusion
5 Principles for Innovative Territorial Projects
5.1. Conventional regimes and principles
5.2. From the dominant conventional regime to a more sustainable one
5.3. Toward innovative regional projects
5.4. Conclusion
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
Other titles from in iSTE Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. The Eurostat method of material flow analysis
Figure 2.2. a) The metabolism of the Midi-Pyrénées region in 2006 according to t...
Figure 2.3a. Final energy consumption of Paris in GJ PCS/capita/year between 180...
Figure 2.3b. Overall energy demand of Paris in GJ PCS/capita/year between 1801 a...
Figure 2.4. The foodprint of Paris expressed in thousands of km
2
Figure 2.5. Contribution of the French provinces to the supply of bread and cere...
Figure 2.6. Contribution of French departments to the supply of cereals to Paris...
Figure 2.7. Evolution of the water footprint of the city of Athens during the 20...
Figure 2.8. Evolution of water consumption and population in New York. For a col...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Wealth-creating subsystem. For a color version of this figure, see w...
Figure 3.2. Agriculture in Aussois in 2012. For a color version of this figure, ...
Figure 3.3. Socio-ecological metabolism of the tourism subsystem in 2012 in Auss...
Figure 3.4. The territory system of wealth creation in Aussois. For a color vers...
Figure 3.5. The place of electricity in a wealth-creating subsystem. For a color...
Figure 3.6. The positioning of players within a project
Figure 3.7. Representation of the role of stakeholders in wealth creation: the c...
Figure 3.8. Diagram of individual motivations in interaction phase. For a color ...
Figure 3.9. The Kolm triangle
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1. Wealth-creating subsystem. For a color version of this figure, see w...
Figure 4.2. Metabolism and capacity of a territorial system
Figure 4.3. Main resources and products related to the wealth-producing activity...
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To Céline who supports me, day after day
Smart Innovation Set
coordinated by
Dimitri Uzunidis
Volume 34
Territorial Ecology and Socio-ecological Transition
Nicolas Buclet
First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Nicolas Buclet to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950525
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-546-6
Acknowledgments
This work has benefited from the support of the French state and in particular, within the framework of the following research projects:
– Projet Trajectories, within the framework of IDEX Université Grenoble Alpes, as part of the “Investments for the Future” program bearing the reference ANR-15-IDEX-02;
– CAP-Bioterproject, funded by ADEME (
Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie
, French Environment and Energy Management Agency), REACCTIF program;
– BOAT project, funded by ADEME (
Agence de l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Energie
, French Environment and Energy Management Agency), GRAINE program.
This publication was also made possible thanks to the exceptional working environment that I enjoy, whether at the PACTE laboratory and the IUGA (Institut d’Urbanisme et de Géographie Alpine, French Institute of Urban Planning and Alpine Geography), whose members and management I would like to thank, or with the colleagues involved in the Trajectories project, a particularly enriching interdisciplinary project on the trajectories of socio-ecosystems. In this respect, I would like to thank Sandrine Anquetin and Sandra Lavorel with whom I had the honor of co-facilitating this project. I would also like to thank Juliette Cerceau, who has helped me a lot in the CAP-Bioter project, which she has carried on with despite administrative adversity.
My thanks also go to the colleagues with whom I have been able to have rich and friendly exchanges with in recent years, whether in Grenoble or elsewhere. In no particular order, I would like to thank Sabine Barles, Gilles Billen, Muriel Maillefert, Sabrina Brullot, Philippe Lescoat, Sophie Madelrieux, Pauline Marty, Pierre-Antoine Landel, Myriam Donsimoni, Magali Talandier, Kirsten Koop, Gilles Debizet, Bernard Pecqueur, Claude Janin, Dany Lapostolle, Pierre-Yves Longaretti and Jean-Yves Courtonne. I have surely forgotten some colleagues and I apologize for this in advance.
Finally, I thank my family Céline and the children, whom I love above all else and whom I am so proud of. I, for one, am not so proud of the world we are leaving them, even though with books like this I try to do my part.
Introduction
For several years now, with a few colleagues involved, especially the participants in the Aussois adventure1, we have typically presented territorial ecology as an emerging interdisciplinary field. We do not know until when the “emerging” qualifier will continue to make sense. It is certain that, despite some important research and wonderful achievements, territorial ecology is still a niche approach, whose methodology needs to be consolidated and must convince a large number of colleagues of its relevance, and even of its necessity. In France in particular, interdisciplinary work is complicated. Recruitment and evaluation procedures in the academic world are still marked by clearly defined disciplines. Interdisciplinarity transcends traditional boundaries, but it is here, we believe, that novelties are found, that well-established habits are shaken up and that certainties are questioned. In this sense, territorial ecology participates in this movement of questioning the compartmentalization of disciplines in order to elaborate innovative approaches and methods in the face of the socio-ecological problems.
This book has several objectives. The first is to situate territorial ecology, a niche interdisciplinary field, within a broader disciplinary family, that of Ecological Economics. In particular, it is important to establish proximities with other fields, be it Viennese social ecology, urban ecology or industrial ecology. 10 years ago, I published a book entitled Industrial and Territorial Ecology. Why this shift toward just territorial ecology with the abandonment of the industrial reference? The purpose of Chapter 1 is to educate the reader about these different aspects, as well as the relationship of territorial ecology with the concepts established by national and international institutions. The nascent territorial ecology was quite easily situated in the field of sustainable development. Things became more complicated, due to a certain dynamism from the institutions. What about territorial ecology in the face of the circular economy, the sustainable bioeconomy or the ecological transition? In this chapter, we would like to pay particular attention to an issue: that it is today the national and international institutions that are setting the conceptual agenda on which a large number of researchers are working. As legitimate as it seems to us that these institutions should share their political agenda and their priorities with the academic world, it is distressing to us that many researchers traipse around the concepts put forward by the institutions. This observation is not reassuring with regard to the state of a part of the research world, burdened by the need to respond to orders and obtain funding, rather than to think independently. To give an example, if the circular economy was initially a concept forged by researchers, it is clear that the meaning given to it today is not at all the same. This would in no way be a problem if it were not for the fact that researchers take up this new meaning and make it their field of research without questioning the consequences of this new meaning. This is why, in this chapter, even though we aim, with territorial ecology, to produce a way of thinking that can be useful to stakeholders, we wish to position ourselves in relation to what sometimes appears to us as a succession of new semantic arrangements that do not necessarily guarantee a renewal of thought and action.
The second objective of this book is to establish, especially for non-specialists as specialists might be disappointed by this too general overview, an inventory of the methods mobilizing the notion of metabolism. Metabolism, whether urban, industrial or territorial, is in fact the backbone from which to think about the analyzed system. The methods are diverse and depend largely on both the objectives sought and the disciplines mobilized, from biogeochemists to historians, urban planners and engineers. This inventory allows us to analyze what can be expected from each of the methods developed and the limits of these methods. More specifically, this allows me to distance myself from these works, most of which are remarkable, and open up a complementary path marked both by my own educational path as an urban planner and, earlier, as an economist, and by more operational goals.
The third objective, which forms the heart of our intentions, consists of proposing a method that will help to carry out an analysis of territorial ecology. This proposal is likely to form the backbone of territorial ecology, while being complementary to the other methods introduced in Chapter 2. It is based on the idea of giving more space to a qualitative analysis of the circulation of flows, in order to understand not only what circulates, but also why and how it circulates. In other words, in addition to a formal presentation of a territory's metabolism, broken down into subsystems that represent the various wealth-creating activities, we detail the different ways of analyzing the intentions behind the flows. As we shall see, this implies that we are interested not only in the circulation of flows of materials, water and energy, but also in the circulation of know-how, the influences that certain actors have on others, and the mobilization of intangible resources, such as heritage.
Thus, Chapter 3 of this book is based on the third chapter of the collective essay on territorial ecology applied to the municipality of Aussois in Savoie (Buclet 2015a). It details the method and removes certain inaccuracies and vagueness that still remained in the previous book. In Aussois, we sketched out a new method based on the analysis of the wealth-creating activities of a territory. Here, we present some of the advances obtained with this method, based on the questions that have arisen in recent years, in the context of various research projects to which I have contributed. As much as possible, this chapter guides the reader who may be considering using this method to analyze a territory. It presents how to produce a representation of the territory by wealth-creating subsystems, and the complementary analysis tools that make it possible to analyze the relationships between stakeholders that underlie these circulating flows, whether it be an analysis of the power games between them, the disparity that may emerge within the territory as to the orientations to be given to a project, or the motivations of one or the other.
Once the foundations of the method set, we wanted to go further and deal, in particular, with the question of co-evolution between human societies and their environment. Indeed, the main criticism that can be made about the method is that undoubtedly, it does not sufficiently take into account the interactions between nature and society. If we consider that a territory is also a socio-ecosystem, that it is not only the preferred scale for analyzing relations to our environment, but also the preferred scale for action at the interface between society and nature, then it is important to develop a grid for analyzing these interrelationships. In order to do this, we rely on the concept of capabilities, which we owe to the Indian economist Amartya Sen, as well as on the notion of territorial resources. Chapter 4 starts from these notions and concepts and revisits them in order to better articulate them with the issues of territorial ecology. We thus move from capability to territorial capability, which consists of a collective capability located at the scale of a territory and whose sustainability depends on socio-ecological balances. We also move from the notion of territorial resources to that of socio-ecological resources, in order to better highlight the fact that it is a co-production between nature and society. On the strength of these revisited notions, we present the stakes of a territory subjected to the socio-ecological constraints that it faces in this chapter. Indeed, we cannot ignore the need to confront our work with the climatic emergency, as well as with all of the ecological imbalances we are facing. Our proposal in this chapter is to articulate the metabolic approach with the notion of territorial capability. We believe that this articulation is likely to help territories to project themselves in the years to come with the aim of reconciling territorial development and environmental issues.
Elaborating a territorial project using territorial ecology, as with any other method, may however be insufficient, given the systemic complexity of sustainability issues. In particular, we cannot overlook the fact that the risk of collapse is the product of the dominant economic system. Thus, in Chapter 5, we will rely on the economics of conventions, and in particular, the notion of conventional regimes, in order to situate sustainability issues. In this chapter, we argue that it is misleading to think about sustainability without radically questioning the reference points that are at the origin of the very problems we intend to solve. This chapter, therefore, aims to present a certain number of principles on which to base an alternative to the dominant conventional regime. I will show that many local initiatives are proving to be bearers of these principles that transform the benchmarks and values that form the basis of a society. In conclusion, I invite the institutions to take into account this transformative, potential source of societal innovation and to use it as a basis for action at the territorial level, and to generate dynamics favorable to the emergence of a sustainable society. In doing so, I hope that this book will convince territorial stakeholders, and even national institutions concerned by the issue of sustainability, of the need to initiate debates around projects about living together, and to base these projects on principles likely to orient individual and collective actions in a sustainable direction.
1
See Buclet (2015), a collective work from a CNRS thematic school on territorial ecology, held in Aussois in 2013.
1Positioning Territorial Ecology in the Scientific and Institutional Context
Science within a given paradigm, recognized for its validity by a community of researchers, advances by successive additions. Territorial ecology, having been developed under the impetus of French-speaking researchers for about 15 years, is the result of an intellectual evolution considering environmental issues using a systemic approach. This interdisciplinary field has its roots in various lines of thought, most of which go beyond disciplinary boundaries, or simply do not take them into account, whether it be Ecological Economics, Industrial Ecology or Social Ecology. It is also in line with work aimed at understanding nature-society relations from a systemic approach, following the example of the work of the Club of Rome and the Meadows Report (1972).
However, it is not only the scientific community that will be considered. In the field of sustainability, scientific knowledge is expressed in many ways with the interplay of institutions. Of course, both local and global institutions feed on what the world of research can bring them, but we sometimes forget how much the reverse is true. In particular, some of the notions mobilized by the scientific community come from the discourse of international institutions (the UN for sustainable development), from experiments carried out by stakeholders in the field (Rob Hopkins for ecological transition), or from the initiative of national institutions (for example, the circular economy in France, a notion that emerged during the Grenelle de l’Environnement1 although its origin is initially scientific).
Our objective is to not only understand which line of thought territorial ecology stems from – research has already been seamlessly carried out on this by Sabine Barles (see, for example, Barles 2010), which we will return to shortly – but to also grasp what territorial ecology is not, given the multiplication of notions that institutional and operational stakeholders grasp. Indeed, the field we are interested in is frequently disturbed by the semantic evolutions practiced by these stakeholders. Thus, the French institutional discourse changed overnight, without taking into account the possible consequences of this change, from industrial ecology to circular economy. Better still, the discourse has resized the limits of industrial ecology without any reflection on what this could mean (see Buclet 2015a). In the same way, the transition from a sustainable development policy to an ecological transition policy was made within French institutions without any particular discussion on the meaning of this change. The name of the ministry in charge of these issues has shifted from one to the other without any explanation of what this change entailed.
What does territorial ecology represent in this context, influenced by both research and political considerations? This is what we will present in this chapter, starting with the research aspect.
1.1. Positioning of territorial ecology from a scientific point of view
Territorial ecology refers to the idea of linking ecological issues with territorial issues. It is in line with work aimed at reconciling environmental sciences and human and social sciences, in order to couple them with the objective of better understanding what we call socio-ecosystems (Ostrom 2009). This interdisciplinary field contributes to bringing together the challenges of human societies as understood by the human and social sciences and “the development of scientific ecology and in particular, the ecosystem theory” (Barles 2004, p. 75). The approach is intended to be systemic, following the example of the study of ecosystems, and based on questions related to thermodynamics (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). As Eugen Odum (1953, cited by Barles 2004, p. 76) indicates, “living organisms, ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole possess the essential thermodynamic characteristic of being capable of creating and maintaining a state of internal order, or low entropy.”
This approach, coupled with the observation of the finiteness of the planet, leads to a consideration of the limits of an industrialized society, voracious in natural resources. While the discovery of the energy power of first coal, then oil, seemed to have brought humanity out of a situation of chronic scarcity, given the needs expressed, and even ushered in the era of unlimited abundance2, the ecological and entropic cost of this power has been critical for the balance of the biosphere for several years now. This period of supposed abundance will only last for a few decades, which is very little compared to the scale of humanity.
1.1.1. Urban ecology
Considering systemic issues is not limited to the global level. As Sabine Barles (2004) reminds us, urban systems are also concerned, in that urban lifestyles are rightly considered particularly resource-intensive. This author quotes Lewis Mumford and his criticisms of megalopolitan gigantism as early as the 1960s. However, above all, Abel Wolman should be remembered here. The article he published in 1965 linked the city to the concept of metabolism for the first time and made this author, alongside Eugene Odum (Barles 2004), one of the founders of urban ecology. He was interested in the material balance (food, water, energy, waste, etc.) of an American city, both the inputs and outputs, and thus highlighted the extent of what he called metabolic problems.
In practice, these problems are reflected in the existence of poor sanitation infrastructures and major air pollution problems (Barles 2004, p. 80). The solution, according to Wolman, is technical and involves investment in infrastructure capable of resolving these metabolic imbalances. The link with ecology still remains rather tenuous, but opens up important perspectives in terms of both theoretical and operational research around the concept of metabolism.
These works, as well as those of Eugene Odum (1963), and then ecologist Paul Duvigneaud (1974), consecrate the idea of the city being studied as an ecosystem. Like Lewis Mumford, Paul Duvigneaud denounced the impact of the gigantism and immoderation of cities, driven by commercial processes (Duvigneaud 1974, p. 245).
Thus, beyond global ecological issues, which are becoming more topical with each passing day, the impacts of the most anthropized ecosystems, in this case cities, are increasing in interest. According to Sabine Barles, the success of this approach is due to the fact that it is based on a systemic approach (Barles 2004, p. 85) familiar to many researchers.
At the price of an analogy with the living world, the city is considered to only be able to live by drawing important resources from its environment, which led Eugene Odum to say that the urban ecosystem is a parasitic ecosystem (Odum 1975). This idea of parasitism was adopted by other authors and established the idea of a city’s total dependence on other ecosystems. This dependence, which is inherent in the urban environment, seems to increase with the size of cities and poses a problem, because the increase of this environment is detrimental to other ecosystems. According to Eugene Odum, the challenge is then to transform the city, reducing its status as a parasite in order to increase possible symbioses with the environment.
This analogy has, as Sabine Barles (2004) points out, been very successful. The idea of comparing the city to an ecosystem that should be studied in the same way as natural ecosystems is taken up by several researchers. Its degree of complexity is certainly considered to be higher, but this should not be an obstacle to avoid. The city rightly enters the field of systems science and can be considered using a technical approach that involves identifying and quantifying the flows that circulate within the system and between it and its external environment.
This approach is attractive, but there are some limitations, as pointed out by Sabine Barles (2004, p. 86). The first, and in our view the most important, is that of the place of humans in the ecosystem under consideration. Humans are not considered as social beings, whose behaviors depend on principles, values, desires and feelings that motivate their actions within the urban ecosystem and thus explain the flows. According to this approach to urban ecology, humans are considered as functional beings, according to metabolic needs classified in very generic categories (living, working, circulating, recreating, etc.). Reducing humans to this mechanistic vision raises serious questions and, above all, reduces the scope of what urban ecology can provide.
Nevertheless, the approach of considering the city as an ecosystem first, and then as a living organism3, will establish a method that analyzes the metabolism of the organisms that cities represent and will encourage more studies on their ecological footprint and on the load capacities of the systems studied.
1.1.2. Industrial ecology
Another field of research into the relationship between human societies and their environment emerges: industrial ecology. If urban ecology is built from a strong analogy between cities and living systems, industrial ecology limits itself to considering this analogy as a source of inspiration. Moreover, beyond some pioneering work (such as the work of a group of Belgian researchers; Billen et al. 1983), industrial ecology will very quickly distinguish itself from urban ecology by its marked operational purpose.
This can be explained by the fact that, beyond previous work, such as that mentioned above on the Belgian ecosystem, and in the opinion of Suren Erkman (2004) in particular, the founding article, not on industrial ecology, but on the craze for this oxymoron, was written by Robert Frosch and Nicholas Gallopoulos of General Motors in 1989 (Frosch and Gallopoulos 1989). These two authors, vice-president of research and head of engine research at General Motors, respectively, consider that:
the traditional model of industrial activity – in which individual manufacturing processes take in raw materials and generate products to be sold, plus waste to be disposed of – should be transformed into a more integrated model: an industrial ecosystem. (Frosch and Gallopoulos 1989, p. 144)
Later they indicate that the industrial ecosystem should function in analogy with a natural ecosystem (ibidem). They write further:
An ideal industrial ecosystem may never be attained in practice, but both manufacturers and consumers must change their habits to approach it more closely if the industrialized world is to maintain its standard of living – and the developing nations are to raise theirs to a similar level – without adversely affecting the environment. (Frosch and Gallopoulos 1989, p. 144)
It can be said that this article is a kind of manifesto of the principles of industrial ecology, to make society evolve toward more sustainability, without calling into question the dominant economic system, on the contrary destined to be generalized to developing countries. It is far from both the main aim of urban ecology, which aims to explain the functioning of cities through a naturalistic and systemic approach, and its critique of modernity. Engineering sciences are at the heart of industrial ecology, with a more operational vision and an optimizing purpose. The editorial of the first issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, in January 1997, sets the tone:
A systems-oriented approach that integrates economic and environmental phenomena is crucial. Industrial Ecology […] focuses on the role of industry in reducing environmental burdens throughout the product life cycle, from the extraction of raw materials, to the production of goods, and to the management of the resulting wastes. (Lifset 1997, p. 1)
The first issues of the same journal are devoted to this guideline with the following titles: “Slow progress in Ecolabeling: Technical or Institutional Impediments”; “The View from Australia”; “The Virtual Ecology of Industry”; “The Industrial Ecology of Lead and Electric Vehicles”; “Life-Cycle Assessment: Constraints on Moving from Inventory to Impact Assessment”; “The Relationship between Cleaner Production and Industrial Ecology”; “Industrial Ecology in Practice: The Evolution of Interdependence at Kalundborg”; “The Life-Cycle of Chlorine, Part I: Chlorine Production and the Chlorine-Mercury Connection”; “Chlorine in the Netherlands, Part I, An Overview”; “Going Organic: Converting Patagonia’s Cotton Product Line” and “Recent Advances in Design for Environment at Motorola”. In this first issue, the issues of pollutants and clean production are highlighted, as well as case studies, with a view to reducing pollutant impact and optimizing the use of resources.
This work has two focuses: methodological work, aimed at increasing the diagnostic capacities of productive processes, via industrial metabolism or life cycle analysis and monographic work on industrial ecology experiments around the world. The technique of success stories will be mobilized, with the Kalundborg symbiosis in Denmark as an example. Long before the publication of the first issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, several publications highlight the success of this industrial symbiosis4. Nicholas Gertler’s thesis, defended in 1995 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), provides a stable basis for the success of Kalundborg through a detailed analysis of the reasons for its success. Kalundborg presents itself as a paradox. It is a small town of about 20,000 inhabitants with an industrial port, whose activities are centered around a thermal power plant for electricity production and an oil refinery. In other words, the typical example of the success of industrial ecology, which is supposed to contribute significantly to increasing the sustainability of our industrial society, is based on the massive use of non-renewable resources with a strong impact on climate change.
Kalundborg’s results, as quantified by Nicholas Gertler, are interesting. Significant savings in water, materials and energy contribute to making Kalundborg a place of industrial tourism for anyone interested in implementing industrial ecology. The analysis even shows that the return on investment of operations to set up eco-industrial synergies is quite short, between three and five years (Gertler 1995). This raises the question of the implementation of comparable projects to the Kalundborg, elsewhere in the world, forgetting certain factors of success in the Danish case, notably the lack of willingness to make industrial ecology (a term that did not exist in 1961, when the municipality began to develop initiatives) and a slow progression in the implementation of synergies (few but decisive synergies during the first 30 years, followed by a singular acceleration from the 1990s5). In other words, after discovering Kalundborg and its spectacular results in terms of flow looping, researchers and practitioners of industrial ecology set themselves the objective of understanding what conditions are needed to establish other eco-industrial symbioses throughout the world and initiate similar dynamics.
It is also in this sense that industrial ecology differs from urban ecology. The analogy pursued in practice (and sometimes even in research) becomes just as much, if not more, a sought-after analogy between Kalundborg (and other less striking success stories) and other industrial zones, as between industrial zones and natural ecosystems. John Ehrenfeld and Marian Chertow even speak of the Kalundborg legacy (2002) as a structuring symbiosis, a model highlighting not only the importance of co-operation between entities, but also the possible financial, as well as environmental, profitability of such symbioses.
From then on, many works strived to discover the key to the success of an industrial symbiosis in order to multiply successful experiences. Mainly driven by the engineering sciences, industrial ecology, like Nicholas Gertler’s work in Kalundborg, is “discovering” the importance of the “human factor”, the undocile variable that disrupts the best planned operations and that has been ignored for so long in favor of optimization on paper.
1.1.3. From industrial ecology to industrial and territorial ecology
Taking into account this “human factor” will immediately feed more reflections in the francophone community. The founding moment of a French-speaking scientific community was the organization of an international conference on the subject at the Université de Technologie de Troyes (UTT) in September 1999. Under the joint impetus of Dominique Bourg and Suren Erkman, co-organizers of this conference, a small community of researchers and practitioners was formed between engineering and social sciences, with the UTT as its epicenter. The challenge is to reflect, notably through fieldwork (Club d’écologie industrielle de l’Aube, Ecopal at Grande Synthe, then other fields elsewhere in France …), on the institutional means of triggering symbiotic dynamics between industrial stakeholders. In conjunction with local public authorities interested in the approach, discussions are underway to identify flows of energy, water or materials likely to initiate synergies between players. Through research programs funded by the Ademe or ANR (COMETHE (Design of Methodological and Evaluation Tools for Industrial Ecology), CONFLUENT (Knowledge of Urban Flows, Environmental Footprints and Sustainable Governance), ARPEGE (Workshop of Prospective Reflection on Industrial Ecology) projects), the French-speaking community is structuring and deepening the organizational and institutional issues related to eco-industrial symbioses6. Under the influence of practitioners such as Benoît Duret (2006), for example, this community is beginning to talk about industrial and territorial ecology, which is more meaningful for local public decision-makers in charge of these approaches. Benoît Duret, after an analysis of a significant number of initiatives in Europe and North America, made 10 recommendations for the “development of industrial and territorial ecology” (2006, p. 38). These recommendations are as follows: develop an ecosystem approach to territories; explore trends related to the networked innovation economy; increase the support of local authorities to cooperation networks; better capitalize and share experiences of industrial ecology; inform, sensitize and train state institutions and local decision-makers; integrate industrial ecology into existing sustainable development practices; articulate industrial ecology with territorial foresight; perpetuate approaches through the creation of dedicated animation structures; build and make available, information on the physical flows of the economy7; and associate industrial ecology strategies with those of the social and solidarity economy. As we can see, we are quite far from an engineering approach and are more on the scale of social issues, inspired by social science concerns. The territory is mentioned, both in terms of the geographical scale and in terms of cooperation between the stakeholders concerned, and brings a specifically French-speaking slant.
