Transitions in complex consumer product sectors: Towards a valuation perspective

Sustainability transitions in complex consumer product sectors pose several analytical challenges. A key characteristic is that technological and institutional innovation strategies have to cope with a variety of competing value demands from vastly distributed markets and regional manufacturing contexts. By building on recent innovation systems and sociology literatures, we claim that transitions in such sectors require changes in valuation structures, i.e. the institutional structures and processes that leverage particular values in the selection environment of the sector. We apply this framework to the dyeing industry in the Tiruppur textile cluster, India’s largest exporter of cotton garments, which was confronted with severe regulatory pressure to stop polluting the local river. In a process spanning over twenty years, the industry has largely managed to endorse wastewater recovery, adopting the concept of ‘zero liquid discharge’ by leveraging an increasing number of industry-internal technological and institutional innovations. Methodologically, we apply process tracing to support our core claim that for the transition to be successful, it was necessary for valuation structures to become increasingly endogenized, i.e. aligned with the industry’s core routines and rationales.