This year ARISE organises its annual sumposium in collaboration with Greening of Industry Network (GIN) and the Sustainability Week at the University of Twente. For the first time, this symposium will be organized in a hybrid manner due to COVID-19 restrictions for traveling. The program will consist of presentations sessions that will be physically held while also being broadcasted online for digital audiences.
About the symposium
The title of this year's symposium is 'Towards Circular Regions'. Transdisciplinary knowledge has been emphasized to facilitate the transition from a linear to a circular economy (CE). Regional and broader scale initiatives are needed to manage multiple actors, sectors, scales and dimensions during the transitionary period. Systematic collaboration among societal representatives through their value chains can enhance regenerative production and consumption systems.
Regionally we pose a number of questions:
- how can government facilitate business transitions to offer products that have self- regenerative potential?
- how can business create business models that are profitable while ensuring resources management includes circularity principles, delivers products at reasonable cost, with high quality, and a self-regenerative sustainable-footprint?
- to what extent can education facilitate society to make purchasing decisions accordingly with responsible-regenerative consumption principles?
Call for papers
We are seeking answers to these questions from different global regions and potentially from transdisciplinary studies. We welcome papers that can contribute to the understanding and discussion of regional sustainability transition with CE at its foundation. In connection considering the three questions listed above, we are also interested in receiving papers that may use any or a combination of enablers to deploy the CE transition. A few potential directions include:
*Transdisciplinary capacity development—policy and law, business administration, engineering, design, urbanism, development theory, modeling, and analyses.
*Scales of collaboration:
- Urban regions including cities, municipalities, neighborhoods, industrial parks, and knowledge institutions.
- Rural regions including agri-parks, smart farming facilities, and cooperatives.
- Mixed regions including products, companies, economic regions, provincial and even national level efforts.
*Tools and strategies
- Strategy development—participatory methods to co-create visions, regional planning tools, triple helix endeavors, policy instruments and legal frameworks.
- Measurement methods—governance assessment, material flows analysis, sustainability matrices, and circularity.
- Technological innovations—products, processes, industrial, and regional level innovations.
*Regenerative business models that incorporate social, financial and technical elements separately and systematically.
Interested parties should send abstracts to the international Towards Circular Regions symposium before August 7, 2020. We look forward to receiving your submissions.
More information and contact
You can contact one of the members of the organizing committee for more information about the symposium.
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