A case study of industrial symbiosis development using a middle-out approach

Industrial symbiosis (IS) emerged as a collective, multi-industrial approach to improve economic and environmental performance through the use of wastes/by-products as substitutes for raw materials. The development of IS initiatives depends on the context in which they occur, characterised in terms of social, economic, political, spatial and temporal embeddedness. As a consequence, the context can be influenced to become more supportive of IS through a continuous, interactive process, combining top-down governmental directives and bottom-up spontaneous business initiatives. A strategy to develop and enhance this process is explored in this paper and described by the authors as a middle-out approach.Policies and policy instruments introduced by governmental agencies provide objectives and incentives to businesses. The middle-out approach induces the development of a strategy to create positive feedback loops among agents (e.g. government, industries) that may guide their actions into setting the conditions to support IS emergence.This paper provides a case study that discusses a regional development of IS in Portugal that highlights critical factors for success in implementing IS, and shows that the middle-out approach can also be understood as an extension and combination of previous research on context factors and planned/spontaneous approaches to IS development.