Stakeholder power in industrial symbioses: A stakeholder value network approach

Forming and sustaining an industrial symbiosis depends on several actors. Actors that have an interest in the symbiosis and the possibility to influence it are called “stakeholders”. According to social exchange theory and resource dependence theory, the power of actors in a network depends on the dependence of other actors on the resources they control. We adapt the stakeholder value network approach from the strategic management literature to the industrial symbiosis context as a means to provide insights into the power of stakeholders of an industrial symbiosis. The approach is applied to a waste incinerator steam network symbiosis case study in France, which has been successfully operated and extended over decades. The results from the case study show that using the stakeholder value network approach enables the assessment of the relative power of symbiosis stakeholders and the identification of key resources on which their power is based. We propose the application of the approach to further case studies in order to identify patterns in the power distribution within symbiosis networks.