Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment * Correspondence to: Dr. Jouni Korhonen, Akademi University, Turku, Finland, Biskopsgatan 8, FI-20500, Åbo, Finland. E-mail: jouni.korhonen@ abo.fi Business Strategy and the Environment Bus. Strat. Env. 17, 411–419 (2008) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/bse.635 Editorial Beyond Eco-Efficiency: a Resilience Perspective Jouni Korhonen 1 * and Thomas P. Seager 2 1 Âbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland 2 Golisano Institute for Sustainability, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA ABSTRACT Business strategy with regard to sustainability is currently dominated by an eco-efficiency approach that seeks to simultaneously reduce costs and environmental impacts using tactics such as waste minimization or reuse, pollution prevention or technological improve- ment. However, in practice, eco-efficiency optimization rarely results in improved diversity or adaptability and consequently may have perverse consequences to sustainability by eroding the resilience of production systems. This editorial article contrasts a resilience approach with an eco-efficiency approach as they relate to strategic sustainable develop- ment. In some cases, the system attributes that are critically important to resilience – such as spare capacity, reserve resource stocks and redundancy – are in opposition to eco- efficiency. Our most important insight is the realization that investments in what may seem counter to eco-efficiency can nonetheless be important for sustainability. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Keywords: eco-efficiency; strategic sustainable development; resilience Introduction A S MANUFACTURING AND BUSINESS OPERATIONS HAVE SOUGHT TO INCORPORATE PRINCIPLES OF SUSTAINABILITY INTO measurable operational objectives, they have increasingly adopted a perspective that can be characterized as eco-efficiency (EE). The concept is defined as increasing productive output while using fewer resources (Schmidheiny, 1992; Welford, 1998) or units of value generation per unit of environmental influence (Brattebo, 2005; Huppes and Ishikawa, 2005). Strategies for achieving eco-efficiency include lean manufacturing, waste minimization or beneficial reuse, investing in technology improvements that raise material or energy yields, and shifting energy resource demands from petroleum based to renewable (such as wind or solar power). The result is almost universally accepted as beneficial to both the economy and the environment (Porter and van der Linde, 1996), as well as supportive of sustainability from the standpoint of meeting current needs while conserv- ing resources for the benefit of future generations. The concept of eco-efficiency has been increasingly cited in public policy (see, e.g., Hukkinen, 2003a, 2003b), cleaner production (Stevenson and Evans, 2004), industrial ecology (Ehrenfeld 2005) and corporate environmental and sustainability management (Figge and Hahn, 2004). The European Union (EU), Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Business