Industrial ecology and sustainable change: inertia and transformation in Mexican agro-industrial sugarcane clusters

This article explores the capacity of industrial ecology to generate sustainable development in Latin America’s agro-industrial clusters. An evolutionary analytical approach is outlined, which is used to study Veracruz’s (Mexico) sugarcane cluster through a qualitative methodology. Our goal is to show that social innovation is key to promoting the sustainable development of clusters characterized by fragmented social, power, and innovation networks. Accordingly, innovations in the realm of industrial ecology often have a dual impact. On the one hand, in the dominant network, industrial ecology is reduced to its technological dimensions within a political-economic framework constrained by its external insertion and the maintenance of power dynamics. On the other hand, industrial ecology is a vehicle for a kind of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship driven by the core values of trust, transparency, acknowledgement of other people’s capabilities, and non-discrimination. This new transformative network promotes true socio-technical change by enhancing local resources and involving other intermediate actors. It also creates a localized agro-food system that promotes the development of cluster-based dynamics in the territory through radical innovations in industrial ecology. The article presents a new way of inserting industrial ecology into the dynamics of cluster-based organizations.