The Social Side of Circular: Self-Organization, Planning and Trust in Industrial Symbiosis

While it is widely recognized that trust plays an important role in the development and maintenance of industrial symbioses, there is a lack of more elaborate theorizing of its modus operandi. Using the pioneering and paradigmatic example of the Kalundborg Symbiosis as our starting point, we engage with the scholarly literature on industrial symbiosis – within the broader scope of industrial ecology and circular economy – and provide a conceptual treatment aiming to showcase the manifold roles that trust plays in its social constitution. We consider the lack of elaborate theorizing about trust as symptomatic of a broader failure to reflect more deeply on the social (as opposed to technical and material) underpinnings of circular initiatives. Thus, our theoretical contribution is indebted to critical sociology and uses the framework of Adler (2001) to provide a holistic view of how the workings of trust, as an organizing principle and coordination mechanism, relates to market and hierarchy. While the market refers to self-organizing processes and hierarchy to planning, trust emerges as a third coordination mechanism able to mitigate limitations or weaknesses of the other two. This framework allows us 1) to challenge accounts that give credence to the market mechanism in the understanding and promotion of industrial symbiosis, and 2) to clarify that trust always needs to be considered in terms of its relations to market and hierarchy.