Article published in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling Advances

In collaboration with Prashant Kumar (a doctoral student at the UNU Resource Nexus), our chair holder, Prof. Dr. Georg Hirte, has published an article titled “Green investment in industrial parks: A CIMO-based systematic review and Resource Nexus perspective” in the journal "Resources, Conservation & Recycling Advances." The abstract of the publication is provided below:

Green investment is increasingly recognized as central to industrial decarbonization; however, within industrial park research, it remains fragmented across the technological, policy, and financial literatures, limiting explanations of how investments translate into sustainability outcomes.This study conducts a systematic literature review of 52 peer-reviewed studies (2004–2024) using a PRISMA protocol and a Context–Intervention–Mechanism–Outcome (CIMO) analytical framework to explain how green investment operates, under what conditions it becomes feasible, and through which mechanisms it generates sustainability outcomes in industrial park systems. The review is the first to integrate mechanism-based analysis with a Resource Nexus perspective to examine the socio-environmental and financial dynamics shaping green investment in industrial parks. The findings show that investment outcomes are not driven solely by technological or policy interventions but by the interaction of contextual conditions, resource stress, park typology, sectoral composition, governance capacity, and operational constraints, with decision-making mechanisms shaping risk perception, investment feasibility assessment, and governance. Public finance emerges as the primary risk-absorbing intervention enabling green investment, while limited private capital mobilization reflects unresolved challenges in de-risking, revenue stability, and project bankability.Environmental outcomes—particularly improvements in energy efficiency, emissions reduction, waste management, and water reuse—are the most consistently documented effects across industrial park contexts, whereas economic and socio-institutional impacts remain contingent on governance alignment, financial architectures, and long-term coordination mechanisms.A Resource Nexus perspective demonstrates that investment success depends on managing interdependencies among energy, water, waste, and material systems rather than treating them as isolated domains. Nexus-oriented investment strategies offer greater potential for system-level efficiency, resilience, and scalability than single-resource interventions.By formalizing the relationships among contextual conditions, intervention architectures, and generative mechanisms, this review advances a mechanism-based understanding of green investment in industrial parks. The findings provide evidence-based implications for policy design, investment structuring, and future research on sustainable industrial park transitions.