Research gaps and future directions on social value stemming from circular economy practices in agri-food industrial parks: Insights from a systematic literature review

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review on the concept of social value emerging from circular economy (CE) practice implementation in agri-food eco-industrial parks. The results show that social value stemming from CE practices is substantially under-researched and provides opportunity for further investigation. Firstly, the literature shows that CE practices have been traditionally analysed at an institutional/company level and have not been truly explored at an eco-industrial park level. Secondly, social value has received a good amount of attention when explored as a value-added element (i.e., CSR, human rights, social justice), however, social value emerging from CE practices and actual business operations is under-researched. In addition, the findings suggest that there is a gap in literature linking CE practices with social value along with economic and environmental performance in agri-food eco-industrial parks. Thirdly, the literature adopts an external pressure approach (mimetic, coercive, normative) when it comes to understanding the motivators for CE practice adoption, however, limited work has been done at the agri-food eco-industrial park level. Similarly, the systematic review identifies that the most utilised theories for explaining CE practice adoption with links to social value consist of institutional, stakeholder, resource-based view, diffusion of innovation, socio-ecological, industrial symbiosis, and systems theories, while theories that have not been used but could provide relevance are contingency, cluster, socio-technical system, social embeddedness, knowledge-based view and endogenous growth theory. Finally, the systematic review reveals that mixed methods research and large dataset analysis approaches are currently scarce in the extant literature which mostly denotes the use of traditional operations management (quantitative) methods.