Suggested use? On evidence-based decision-making in industrial ecology and beyond

Industrial ecology (IE) research has well established expertise in accounting for the material stocks, flows, and associated impacts of industrial and consumer activities in a variety of scales and manifestations. As with many other science and social science fields, however, the pathways from IE research findings to policy and business decision-making are often unclear and unsatisfactory. This issue creates a challenge for the application of industrial ecology to sustainable development. By reviewing several strands of literature, this article investigates alternative ways to generate and use research findings to support decision-making and social change. It argues that advances in both the core and the emerging methods in IE complement each other to improve transparency and reliability of research evidence; extension and contextualization of current findings corresponding to different stages in policy-making and organizational decision processes make research evidence more informative; a learning perspective makes research evidence valuable and used in more flexible ways. To better assist decision-making for societal change, more dialogues between researchers of different methodological cultures and between researchers and other stakeholders and a paradigm shift in social systems for which industrial ecologists should be conscious and proactive are required.