Institutional Feedback and Collective Learning in Industrial Waste Management

Heavy industries offer an interesting research subject of complex operational environment of waste management. Due to massive amounts of processed materials, heavy industries also play a crucial role in achievement of challenging recycling targets that many countries have set for the future. Major challenge is to increase material recycling between branches of industries. Production facilities should not be seen as bounded units, but as parts of wider industrial symbioses in which secondary material flow from one plant could serve as raw material for another process or as a component of a novel product. Such symbiosis-like industrial networks, however, are difficult to manage. Management and development of industrial symbioses requires that different stakeholders are constantly able to develop new possibilities for recycling. This, in turn, requires that stakeholders are collectively able to learn from each other to create nuanced picture of the network they are parts of. Considering this, the key question in industrial waste management is: how can we create such institutional tools that encourage collective learning in complex operational environments? Numerous analyses concerning the performance of different policy designs have ended up emphasizing the importance of such flexibility that allows steering the regulation based on regulated actors' experiences. Such an opportunity may be called as a feedback between institutional and operational environments and it seems to be very important element also according to collective learning. Few studies, however, have analyzed the capability of policy designs to strengthen such institutional feedback in practice. Based on a case study of industrial region located in the northern Finland, I argue that institutional feedback is very important in industrial waste management. My preliminary findings point out that optimally institutional feedback allows the continuous learning and the development of industrial systems towards better material efficiency.