Reassembling local-regional industrial networks towards sustainability: an evolving “eco-transformation arena” in a Chinese industrial district

This paper investigates a pathway for transforming small and medium enterprise-based industrial districts to eco-industrial development in newly industrialised countries. Our framework conceptualises the eco-transformation of industrial districts as a reassembling process of local-regional industrial networks toward sustainability from an ‘arenas of development’ perspective, highlighting how an emerging eco-transformation arena may challenge existing unsustainable industrial networks. We employ a case-study method to illuminate how such an eco-transformation arena has emerged in Shunde District in Southern China and evolved in the dimensions of continuity, scale and depth of transformation. The results show the pathway is driven by national policy intervention and local government responses. The subsequent development is likely to shift into a fluid, non-linear process unfolded through the continuing interaction of agenda setting, actors and their relationships, strategies and actions performed, translation projects and spaces of negotiation (i.e. the arena’s five components) while being influenced by context and place-specificity.