Institutional capacity building for industrial symbiosis in the Canal Zone of Zeeland in the Netherlands: a process analysis

One of the assumptions underlying much of the research on Industrial Symbiosis (IS) that has been performed over the past decades is that besides technical and economic feasibility collaboration between firms is of central importance to the development of IS. So far, there has been little systematic research into the process through which firms and other relevant actors build up collaborations for IS. I present Event Sequence Analysis as a research approach that allows for a systematic, longitudinal analysis of process phenomena and I outline the steps to be taken in the application of the approach. I demonstrate the value of the approach by offering a first analysis of how companies in the Canal Zone of Zeeland in the Netherlands build up the institutional capacity that enables them to address the development of IS collaboratively. The analysis reveals that institutional capacity did not build up in a linear way. The generation of institutional capacity enabled the involved actors to engage in increasingly complex by-product synergies and utility synergies. It also enabled the actors to develop a strategic vision in which they articulated the development of a bio based industrial cluster as a common purpose. This common purpose stimulated the actors to shift their focus from the development of individual synergies to the development of a regional network of such synergies. Event Sequence Analysis proves to be a promising approach to investigating phenomena such as institutional capacity building and the emergence and development of Industrial Symbiosis.