Assembling Social Industrial Ecology

Research Project, 2011 – 2016

The project is about developing cross-disciplinary collaborative arenas in the field of Industrial Ecology, a field with an overarching aim of ecological transformation of society. To date, IE
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research is dominated by material flow studies and the engineering sciences, but IE has yet to fulfill its potential without serious attention to the human organisation around society ́s material flows. This calls for coordinated efforts to bring in social sciencists into the sphere of IE research, as to more systematically develop cross-disciplinary learnings. The project also aims for developing international leadership skills for Dr Baumann, Chalmers, through immersion into the prominent Dutch IE milieu with Erasmus University Rotterdam as acting host. Dr Baumann together with Prof Boons at EUR plan a range of activities to develop collaborative structures promoting 1/ the international collaboration of the presently fragmented social science part of IE research, 2/ capacity-building for social industrial ecology, in academia as well as among professionals, and 3/ interdisciplinary integration at host and applicant milieus. The overall goal of the project is to further relevant knowledge concerning the issues of governance of production and consumption systems in our globalised society.