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Life cycle sustainability assessment of distributed manufacturing

Troullaki Aikaterini

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Summary

In the face of escalating warnings of ecological breakdown and amid a systemic crisis spanning social, economic, geopolitical and existential dimensions, pathways for sustainable development are being intensively explored. Dominant responses continue to center on green growth, seeking to decouple economic expansion from environmental harm through ‘cleaner’ technologies and novel production and consumption strategies. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and its broader evolution into Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), plays a key role in evaluating innovations aligned with these strategies. However, a growing body of critical scholarship challenges the adequacy of green growth as a strategy for human development. Alternative pathways are emerging from grassroots movements and post-growth imaginaries that emphasize systemic transformation. Among these, cosmolocal production, a mode of provisioning based on globally shared design knowledge and localized manufacturing, has gained visibility as a commons-oriented, post-capitalist innovation. Yet, there is a critical lack of systematic, theoretically grounded assessment frameworks capable of capturing the unique characteristics and sustainability implications of such radical systemic innovations.This thesis responds to this gap by taking LCSA as a point of departure to develop an assessment framework grounded in sustainability science and tailored for radical systemic innovations, such as cosmolocal production. The framework conceptualizes sustainability across three interrelated levels: the product, the organizational model, and the socio-technical system (or niche). It integrates theories and tools from sustainability assessment, sustainable business models, and sustainability transitions while navigating diverse interpretations of sustainability through a ‘dialectic’ stance: one that treats assessment as a respectful conversation among different ways of knowing.The empirical focus is on Locally Manufactured Small Wind Turbines (LMSWTs), a globally distributed case of cosmolocal production. Drawing on six case studies across Europe, the Middle-East, the United States and Latin America, the thesis employs mixed-methods approaches to evaluate LMSWTs at each level: life cycle-based tools are used to track sustainability impacts and values at the product level; business models and delivery models in diverse contexts are comparatively analysed at the organizational level; and sustainability transitions approaches enriched with critical perspectives are applied at the trans-local niche level.The findings demonstrate that conventional LCSA approaches risk underestimating the sustainability potential of cosmolocal innovations and offer limited strategic insights for their development. By expanding the assessment scope beyond product life cycles to include organizational and systemic dimensions, and by integrating both impacts-based and values-based approaches, this research presents how a more pluralistic approach to sustainability assessment can be developed. Such an approach better captures the multidimensionality of radical systemic innovation and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration to advance its theory and practice.Overall, the thesis contributes to the advancement of sustainability assessment frameworks by grounding assessment in the theoretical foundations of sustainability science and expanding their applicability to radical systemic innovations. In doing so, it makes theoretical and practical contributions towards transforming how sustainability is assessed, and ultimately pursued, in an era of systemic crisis.

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