Seminari - Federica Massa

Federica Massa Saluzzo (EADA Business School) will present her paper “Making sense of regeneration to foster sustainability transition at an industry level. The case of regenerative fashion,” along with Veronica Devenin (EADA). 

Abstract:

Regeneration is emerging as a promising approach to address the current levels of environmental degradation and the climate crisis. In contrast to sustainability, which focuses on reducing harm, regenerative businesses aim to restore and enhance social-ecological systems that have been degraded. It represents a disruptive approach as it takes the social-ecological systems health and wellbeing as its starting point. However, in a highly heterogeneous landscape where sustainability adoption by companies is uneven, and with limited empirical evidence on regenerative organizations, it remains uncertain how an industry-wide transition to a regenerative perspective will unfold.Our study addresses this question by using the fashion industry as a research setting. As this is an emergent topic, we adopt exploratory, qualitative methods. We have identified 65 potential cases to interview at a global level, including fashion brands, fashion institutes and organizations, suppliers, and certifiers, from which we have already interviewed 11, most of them fashion brands. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature of sustainability transitions, particularly to understand how industry actors collectively make sense of a disruptive approach such as regeneration, characterized by a systemic, ecocentric perspective. This is particularly relevant in understanding how to prospectively make sense of a new paradigm for business activity that is urgently needed to achieve social-ecological systems health, because of the nascent stage and ‘real utopia’ condition of the regenerative paradigm.