Governing a Green Urban Growth Machine: The Case of Kitakyushu Eco-Town, Japan

Abstract

The restructuring of industrial cities takes various forms depending on local conditions and strategic choices. One approach to addressing this challenge is to link industrial park development with the circular economy. Some of these initiatives are led by local governments, creating a governance dilemma as they are expected to enable both public value creation and business profitability. This article examines the role of city government and its relationships with key stakeholders in building a green growth coalition around a recycling-oriented industrial area. The study employs a single-case study design focusing on Kitakyushu Eco-Town, Japan’s largest recycling-oriented industrial park. Particular attention is paid to the role of the city government as a key factor in the green growth coalition. The findings show that the City of Kitakyushu, through a range of policy measures, has played a decisive role in forming a growth coalition that has fostered green restructuring. However, the economic sustainability of this coalition remains highly contingent. Its success depends on local leadership and other endogenous factors, as well as on its connections to exogenous forces ranging from national government policies to global economic and technological trends.

1. Introduction

The decline of industrial cities in the post-war decades, together with growing environmental concerns, put pressure on local actors to balance economic and environmental goals while promoting economic development and community well-being. These pressures catalyzed ecological modernization [1,2] and green restructuring [3], presenting the green economy as an attractive option with genuine potential to exploit niche markets and reorganize local and regional economies [4]. This development sparked interest in the green industrial city [5,6,7] and, as its local spatial manifestation, the eco-industrial park (EIP) [8,9,10,11] as a new type of industrial district [12,13,14]. The overarching goal of such a park is to generate economic growth and create employment opportunities by attracting investment and supporting R&D activities while simultaneously promoting sustainable development [15,16].

There are various groups of local actors that have an interest in driving—and at times opposing—green economic transformation, including manufacturers, business associations, local decision makers, investors, environmental movements, and residents. Ideally, environmental and business interests are brought into balance in this multi-actor setting through private-sector adaptations and public governance. However, the reality of such processes is considerably more complex than this ideal suggests. One framework for understanding how these competing interests may be reconciled is the green growth machine. It builds on the growth machine thesis, which emerged in the USA in the 1970s and developed further in the following decade, reflecting the particularities of urban development under capitalism. Because this and similar critical approaches to the political economy of the greening of urban development have traditionally revolved around private landownership and local business interests, the role of the institutions of local governance remains insufficiently researched [17,18]. This gap is evident in the context of EIP development [19,20]. We seek to address this issue by advancing both theoretical and empirical understanding of institutionally embedded growth-coalition building, with special reference to local government. Drawing on the preceding discussion, this article aims to answer the following question: What characterizes the city government’s role and its view of key stakeholders in the building of a green growth coalition around a recycling industrial park in the context of a mature developmental state?

We will address this question by emphasizing the institutional environment within which local growth coalitions emerge. Our discussion reflects the interplay between the city government and its coalition partners in determining the balance between economic growth and sustainability, which takes shape through environmentally oriented industrial policy (e.g., [21,22]). This enables us to build a novel institutionally oriented account of the emergence and functioning of a green urban growth machine.

Given the conceptual and empirical complexity of the research problem, we employ a case study methodology. Our case is the Eco-Town project of the City of Kitakyushu, which played a pivotal role in establishing the largest cluster of recycling industries in Japan. It is a specialized industrial area that functions as a circular-economy hub, bringing together independent recycling enterprises and waste-processing facilities and thereby revitalizing the city’s industrial profile.

The article first establishes the theoretical foundations of the green growth machine. It then outlines the case selection and methodological approach before analyzing the building of a green growth coalition around the recycling industrial park. Lastly, the Discussion section (Section 5) elaborates on our findings and their implications, and the concluding remarks briefly summarize the final results and explain the limits of the study.

2. The Emergence of a Green Urban Growth Machine

The emergence of industrial parks stems from the local aspirations to generate economic growth or at least decelerate the contractionary spiral of the local economy. This perspective is articulated in the growth machine thesis, which describes the contradictions of local economic development under capitalism [23,24]. It emerged from the Chicago school of urban sociology and the community power studies, combined with selected elements of urban political economy [25]. It is a meso-level theory, loosely connected to urban regime theory [26], institutional analyses of urban development [27], critical urban governance research [28], and the concept of urban entrepreneurialism [29], which all share a critical view of neoliberal urbanism as their common denominator [30].

2.1. The Foundational Tenets of the Growth Machine Theory

The growth machine thesis argues that the shared interests of parochial elites are the primary drivers behind the local growth agenda, making the city a locus of capital accumulation [23,25,30,31,32]. It assumes that place entrepreneurs and their associates seek to legitimate their local development efforts by claiming that growth benefits us all. This claim underpins the notion of value-free development, according to which land use issues should be left to free-market logic, that is, to the price mechanism governing the supply of and demand for land [24]. This perspective reflects the situation in US cities, where private ownership has substantially shaped urban development. The twist is that property owners and developers try to use the local policymaking apparatus to maximize returns on their investments [30,32].

In terms of agency, the growth machine thesis revived interest in the role of local elites in reshaping urban development, thereby connecting it to urban entrepreneurialism [29]. Its paradigmatic setting is based on an antagonism between place entrepreneurs and urban residents. In this setting, place entrepreneurs or urban rentiers form a growth coalition that attempts to intensify the exchange value of urban places. Urban entrepreneurialism renews interest in local government as a growth-coalition actor. This aligns with the growing tendency of local governments to adopt market-driven approaches to attracting investment and fostering economic growth [29].

2.2. Greening the Urban Growth Machine

As self-governing democratic entities, cities continuously navigate divergent economic, technological, social, cultural, and political trends in pursuit of growth. One of them is the green economy agenda, within which the circular economy (CE) has become one of the most widely discussed concepts vis-à-vis urban economic development due to its growth prospects and natural connection with urban metabolism [33,34,35]. This agenda was gradually incorporated into the economic development strategies of many progressive and innovative cities in the developed world [36], as reflected in the emergence of urban environmental regimes that are growth-oriented and spatially selective, and rely on consensual mainstreaming in urban politics [4]. Although this development has been typical of Anglo-American and European liberal democracies [31,37], it has also emerged in a few Asian countries, most notably in the developmental and post-developmental states in East Asia [38].

Although the economic environment has changed dramatically in recent decades and may even occasionally align with an anti-growth orientation [39], local land and property owners continue to attract global value flows to particular localities and, as part of this process, promote the intensification of the use of privately owned land, buildings, and infrastructure [23,24]. This creates a complex dynamic between pro-growth and anti-growth forces. Both may be transnationally oriented or “cognitively globalized,” to some degree, while simultaneously seeking to leverage local government to advance their interests. Anti-growth advocates generally argue that an uncontrolled pro-growth agenda compromises residents’ living conditions, particularly through environmental degradation, and potentially decreases the use value of land [24]. Environmental movements constitute a prominent group among these opposition forces [40], which actively seek to influence local economic development policy (cf. [41,42,43,44]).

While the relationship between the growth coalitions and environmental movements is often conflictual, that is not invariably the case, as such coalitions can exhibit flexibility by absorbing or reflecting innovative environmental policies [19]. This is evident in contemporary academic discourse on the greening of the urban growth machine, which has addressed such issues as the formation of green growth coalitions [36,45], green investment and gentrification [46,47,48,49], challenges to ecological modernization [50], the flexibility of green growth agendas [19], and inter-industry tensions in industrial policy [51]. These themes suggest that aspects of environmentalism are malleable and may be used instrumentally for competitive advantage, strategic maneuvering, or economic gain. Designing and implementing an environmentally friendly local growth agenda may therefore be either a smooth or a contentious process, depending on local conditions, stakeholder relationships, local leadership, and institutional capacity [36,52,53].

In local economic development, all the key urban functions—investment, production, distribution, and consumption—are integrated in a decentralized manner, involving a wide range of different actors [54,55]. The same applies to the greening of such development [20,35,56]. The multidimensionality of the growth-machine formation requires broad perspectives on green growth [20,57,58,59]. A notable feature of this setting is the role of public actors, particularly local government as a key local player capable of assuming different roles [60,61]. The roles of public actors are context-dependent, shaped by history, ideological foundations, political culture, and administrative tradition (e.g., [62]). Together, these elements create a complex setting that is conditioned by local and external factors. They affect the roles and relationships of local actors who participate in building or opposing a green growth coalition and ultimately shape urban economic restructuring.

Framed within our research problem, this discussion underscores the role of green growth machine discourse in conceptualizing how development policies and resource allocations prioritize green investments under local and contextual pressures. It provides a multifaceted account of the roles of municipalities and other stakeholders in this change. Ultimately, this discussion centers on the question of how greening is operationalized and which actors are pivotal in this process. Because the existing evidence is fragmented and limited, constructing a definitive theory-based framework for the analysis is difficult. Thus, we therefore draw on selected thematic domains that incorporate both general theoretical perspectives and, in the Discussion, previous empirical findings concerning Kitakyushu and Japan. This approach allows us to contextualize and elaborate our empirical findings within the ongoing scholarly debate.

3. Methodology

3.1. Case Study Methodology

The structural and relational characteristics of EIPs vary across cases, making it challenging to develop a robust research design. In order to clarify the setting, our discussion focuses on three major components: the industrial park as an organized entity; the city government as a pivotal actor within the local stakeholder landscape; and local and national policies for green industrial restructuring as the overarching policy framework. We aim to provide an account of a complex phenomenon and to build a theoretically grounded analysis using context-sensitive data. A research strategy that is particularly appropriate for such a purpose is the single case study. More specifically, our approach follows an illustrative case study design, using a framework-guided description to examine a purposefully selected instance of local government involvement in a green growth machine within its natural context.

Rather than statistical generalizations, we seek so-called analytical generalizations of specific aspects of green growth machine development in the given context. An in-depth examination of this phenomenon allows for the interpretation and contextualization of the relationships and modes of action within aspirational coalition formation (see, e.g., [63]). Such a research setting creates a precondition for refining growth machine theory and identifying critical aspects of the localization of green industrial restructuring [64,65,66].

3.2. Case Selection

A review of EIPs as manifestations of green growth machine revealed almost as many exceptions as cases, indicating that each park has distinctive conditions and characteristics. Nevertheless, they also share many features from the mission to certain aspects of organizational structures and stakeholder relationships. We sought a case in which the public-sector interests were clearly pronounced, including both park development and its integration into local public policy. This emphasis reflects our interest in those societal contexts where local government actively integrates industrial and green policies and thereby shapes growth-coalition formation.

After searching for suitable cases in different societal contexts, the Eco-Town program in Japan attracted our attention as a collection of recycling and infrastructure projects. The program was of particular relevance as it sought to revitalize local areas through environmental industries in the context of a mature East Asian developmental or post-developmental state [67,68,69,70,71,72,73]. Among the projects financed through the national program, the Kitakyushu Eco-Town project in Kyushu Island is in its own class in terms of reputation and scale [74,75,76,77,78,79]. We also considered another prominent case, the Kawasaki Eco-Town Plan, co-financed through the Eco-Town program. While Kawasaki centers on the circulation of waste and energy among existing manufacturing plants within its coastal industrial complex—thereby emphasizing industrial symbiosis—Kitakyushu actively leverages environmental policy as an approach to industrial development by fostering a dedicated cluster of recycling industries. Moreover, Kawasaki leveraged its Tokyo metropolitan location to pioneer large-scale industrial symbiosis, whereas Kitakyushu drove regional revitalization through community-led remediation geographically removed from Japan’s largest conurbation. We ended up examining the Kitakyushu Eco-Town project in greater depth. It illustrates the use of recycling industrial parks as an industrial spearhead project around which the city government attempts to build a green growth coalition (on the principles of case selection, see [80]). It is worth noting that the recycling industry is a characteristic feature of Japan’s EIP policy, as pointed out by Putra and others in their bibliometric analysis of EIP projects in East Asia [81].

Kitakyushu Eco-Town is a recycling industrial park, which is a special form of EIP [82,83]. It is worth remembering that in the given context the term “Eco-Town” does not refer to a multi-dimensional sustainable community but a large-scale industrial district (cf. [84]). The name derives from the Japanese Eco-Town program. Kitakyushu Eco-Town continued its operation under this name after the national program ended. Gradually, Kitakyushu became widely recognized as a leading green city in East Asia through its extensive sustainability-oriented policies. These measures are central to the city’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) vision, which explicitly targets inclusive green growth [D1]. This framework covers practically all policy fields, including the promotion of economic development, which has been characterized as “SDG-focused local industrial policy” [85].

3.3. Data Collection and Analysis

This article employs a qualitative single-case study methodology with a strong theoretical foundation. The core feature of analysis is exemplification [86], guided by the growth machine thesis [23,24,25,31] and an academic discourse surrounding the greening of urban growth machines [19,20,51].

The interview sample comprised two representatives of the City of Kitakyushu (Interviews 1 and 2), two representatives of Eco-Town Center (Interviews 3 and 4), and three representatives of Kitakyushu Urban Center (KUC) (Interviews 5 to 7) interviewed in Kitakyushu in 2024 and 2025 (see Appendix A). The interviews ranged in duration from 30 to 90 min, with an average length of approximately 45 min, with the exception of an informal interview at the time of the field trip (Interview 4), which lasted about 10 min. Program Director of KUC was interviewed twice for the purpose of elaborating core themes and validating our interpretations (Interview 7). The semi-structured interviews addressed the management and governance of the Eco-Town project. The structure of our interview was based on the following themes: (a) the management of the Eco-Town area; (b) the most important stakeholder groups; (c) policy instruments and their use; (d) interests and tensions related to the Eco-Town project; (e) the green growth agenda in economic restructuring; and (f) the distinctive features of the green urban growth machine in Kitakyushu. We were particularly interested in how aspects of growth machine thinking appeared in the interview data. This provides some indication of how the distinctive characteristics of the case reflect its institutional, economic, and societal contexts.

The data analysis used deductive coding of qualitative data with a predefined set of codes connecting the data to green growth machine theorization [87]. After the initial categories were narrowed, the four anchor categories were used in the reflexive thematic analysis [88]: drivers/rationale; local government; stakeholders; and green growth. These categories form the main themes of empirical analysis. In terms of analytical steps, following the operationalization of the framework and initial familiarization with the data, we reviewed the material not only as coded segments but also by describing how the theory manifested in specific quotations. This approach retained analytical flexibility, which is one of the key methodological principles of reflexive thematic analysis [88]. We then mapped and refined the theoretical themes by placing them within a theoretically grounded structured narrative that contextualized each fragment. The reflexive thematic analysis of interview data, framed within the historical background and contextualized by insights from prior case studies, forms the core of the findings (see Section 4). In the final phase, these descriptions were incorporated into empirical analysis and further developed in the Discussion by assessing the findings in relation to the preceding academic discussion. Figure 1 illustrates the overall research design.

Figure 1. Methodological outline of the study.

Organizations produce documentary materials that reflect both their self-understanding and the social realities to which they relate [89,90]. We reviewed thematically selected policy and promotional documents to identify relational aspects associated with the formation, operation, and challenges of the green urban growth coalition organized around the Kitakyushu Eco-Town project (see Appendix B). The use of documents is consistent with an idiosyncratic, in-depth case study methodology. Because many of the relevant documents were promotional, they were assigned a supplementary role relative to the expert interviews and used selectively through descriptive policy-document analysis [91,92]. They are cited in the text using the codes [D1]–[D8].

In addition to interviews and documents, two field trips were organized to various destinations in the city of Kitakyushu, the selected recycling plants in Eco-Town being the primary destinations of these visits (see Appendix C).

Finally, we utilized previously published case studies on Kitakyushu Eco-Town as supplementary material to describe our case and its historical development, deepen the analysis, and evaluate the findings. Their main role was to refine the data analysis and validate our interpretations [74,75,76,77,78,79,85,93,94,95,96,97].

4. Findings

In this section, we will discuss the rationale, local governance, green growth agenda, and stakeholder relations of the green urban growth coalition built around the Kitakyushu Eco-Town in Japan.

4.1. Kitakyushu Eco-Town Project: Rationale, Drivers, and Key Actors

The historical background of Kitakyushu’s industrial restructuring lies in the city’s role as one of the largest heavy industrial complexes in Japan. This development accelerated during the economic growth period from the mid-1950s until the oil crises of the 1970s. An unintended consequence of this development was that by the 1950s, the city became extremely polluted [93]. The unsustainability of Kitakyushu’s development brought about counterforces that could be ignored by neither industrial leaders nor the city government. It created pressure not only to reduce air and water pollution but also to restructure industry [79,98].

A change agent who turned these pressures into visionary industrial policy was Mayor Koichi Sueyoshi [76]. He served as the mayor of the city from 1987 until 2007. He took decisive steps towards bringing local stakeholders together to plan and implement economic development in which environmental concerns were given a major role (Interview 7). This collaborative work with key stakeholders was organized by setting up several committees since 1989 [75,76,78]. Collaboration with large corporations—especially with Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC)—was essential at that time, as they had reclaimed land in the Hibikinada area of Wakamatsu ward. The area owned primarily by NSC had become underutilized due to industrial decline, while the planned recycling-oriented industrial district had high spatial requirements. In the 1990s, the city government purchased three-quarters of the Hibikinada area in order to lease plots to recycling firms [75,78]. In this process, other key stakeholders included Toshiba, Mitsui, the Harbor Bureau, technology experts, and a few civic organizations [78]. This work was continued by another long-serving mayor, Kenji Kitahashi, who led the city government from 2007 until 2023. These mayors focused on economic development while simultaneously promoting progressive environmental initiatives. The next mayor was Kazuhisa Takeuchi, who continued the forward-looking leadership of his predecessors.

With a then-novel green industrial transition in mind, the city government approached relevant ministries on this issue. Soon the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) set up a national Eco-Town program. The initial objective of the program was to extend the operational lifespan of existing landfill sites in different parts of Japan while at the same time revitalizing and stimulating local industries. In all, 26 Eco-Towns were established within the national program, which lasted from 1997 until 2006 [36,83]. Kitakyushu became the first city to be accepted in the program in 1997. Irvine and Bai [76] argued that funding from national sources was essential to the Eco-Town project in its early years. It is worth emphasizing that the development of the national regulatory framework was of vital importance too, for the Basic Law for Establishing the Recycling-based Society came into force in January 2001 accompanied by several special recycling laws enacted in the early 2000s. This gave an additional impetus to the creation of a recycling market (Interview 7; 5).

Kitakyushu City had skilled human resources and an industrial base, as well as a network of residents, businesses, and the local government, so efforts to turn the Hibikinada area into an environmentally friendly city began with a unified collaborative system. (Interview 1)

Hibikinada became a large industrial area promoted within the national Eco-Town policy framework. It benefited from the industrial heritage and related technological advances in the city as well as the nearby port. Unlike many other early eco-industrial districts, Kitakyushu Eco-Town was not based on the idea of industrial symbiosis as such but focused at the outset on recycling as its industrial profile, which matched well with the rising CE agenda.

The Eco-Town project is a policy that aims at achieving zero emissions by turning all waste into raw materials for other industries. The City’s policy is to attract recycling companies, and it will give priority to such businesses. (Interview 2)

Thus, the major preconditions for the establishment of Kitakyushu Eco-Town were location, availability of land, institutional support, and a business-friendly city government.

Land availability at a reasonable price is a big motivation to start up the recycling business here in Kitakyushu, with considerable support from the Kitakyushu city government, including administrative procedures and R&D funding. (Interview 7)

4.2. City Government as Growth Coalition Builder

Even if Kitakyushu is an industrial city par excellence, which suggests that industrial corporations are likely to be among the most influential growth machine players, the city government was actually the most active actor in the coalition that was built around the Eco-Town project. The city of Kitakyushu developed into a progressive pioneer in green restructuring. Its flagship initiative was the Eco-Town project, which received both national and international recognition.

One of Kitakyushu’s strengths is its ability to form policies under local government leadership. (Interview 1)

The city government was instrumental in developing the Hibikinada area and attracting recycling businesses there. The factual managerial role is currently played by the Circular Economy Promotion Division of the Environment Bureau of the city government. It focuses on supporting business and technological development related to the Eco-Town area, such as providing experimentation facilities, granting subsidies for R&D, promoting industry-academia collaboration, facilitating business-to-business collaboration, and supporting startup companies (Interview 2). There is, however, neither an appointed CEO managing the park operations nor direct involvement in the businesses operating in the park. The city government coordinates the park development and gives guidance whenever deemed appropriate or requested by companies (Interview 2). The city operates like a one-stop shop or a liaison office but in a less bureaucratic manner than what is common in Japanese local government (Interview 1).

City Hall tends to act as an intermediary, provide cooperation, and provide subsidies. (Interview 3)

For promotional and educational purposes, it set up Eco-Town Center in 2001 as the area’s visitor hub, with permanent exhibition, classrooms, and staff, which implies that industrial tourism was part of the Eco-Town project from the beginning (Interview 4).

4.3. Stakeholder Interests in the Local Governance Setting

The City of Kitakyushu has an enabling orientation in governing the Eco-Town area (Interview 1). Even if the city government is a primus inter pares in local governance, its role is primarily collaborative, enabling, and persuasive.

Eco-Town is a collaborative enterprise in the sense that the city government emphasized at the outset responsiveness towards civil society and also collaboration with academia and businesses ([99]; see also [100]). A characteristic feature of Eco-Town coalition building is its inherent multi-sector and multi-scalar nature, with an exceptionally strong international dimension (cf. [76,78]).

The Eco-Town project is resourced collaboratively by public and private landowners, private corporations, and city and national governments. The management of the area is rather decentralized. For example, there is no excessive preferential treatment of Eco-Town companies (Interview 3). The city government keeps the managerial issues in the recycling business at arm’s length. It becomes active only when businesses need connections, advice, or support for technological development (Interview 1; 6; 7).

Citizen participation in local environmental issues began long before the Eco-Town project. Initially, urban residents organized protests against pollution in the city, but over time their role changed as the situation improved, and the city government began to implement progressive environmental policies. The city government was keen to organize awareness campaigns and facilitate education as a precondition for structural change [D2], while as a practical solution it introduced an advanced household waste separation system, which created a material connection between local residents’ lifestyles and industrial-scale recycling [95].

Kitakyushu is a pioneering city that gets residents to sort their waste at the source—the most challenging yet crucial stage for recycling. Waste categories requiring sorting include, for example, glass, PET bottles, plastics, light bulbs, and so on. The city collects these pre-sorted materials and delivers them directly to recycling companies. (Interview 7)

Currently, the main activity is to strengthen environmental awareness among school children and local residents, including organized visits to Eco-Town Center, which contributes directly to recycling efforts (Interview 2; 4). This gradually builds loose symbiotic relationships between industries, retailers, and urban dwellers.

4.4. Aspiring Green Growth

Kitakyushu has transformed from a heavily polluted industrial city into an internationally recognized green growth city [36]. It has focused on developing and exporting its expertise in environmental technologies, recycling systems, and other CE solutions. It has shown genuine interest in integrating environmental and industrial policies.

The Eco-Town project channels green growth ideas through the recycling industry, which has distinctive characteristics in terms of profit generation and job creation. Even if the area was not designed as a symbiotic EIP as such, the idea of industrial and urban symbiosis has been part of the philosophy that inspired the development of the area.

I cannot really say that Eco-Town has succeeded in achieving industrial symbiosis. We changed the Eco-Town concept into a recycling industry complex. (Interview 7)

Eco-Town’s direct impact on job creation is relatively modest.

The impact of Eco-Town’s job creation is relatively small. The recycling industry is a challenging industry to run, and it is difficult to create many jobs compared with arterial industries, such as automobiles and steel. (Interview 2)

Green growth requires innovations, incentives, and investments, and it may be that Kitakyushu does not generate such activities as it did a few decades ago. It has reached the point at which it has derived most of the benefits from the recycling market and businesses rooted in the early years of the launch of the national Eco-Town program. While some niche markets are assumed to expand in the future, as in the case of recycling waste solar panels (visit to Shinryo Corporation, see Appendix C), time seems ripe for new initiatives, as seen in the city government’s proactive promotion of wind energy production through the Kitakyushu Hibikinada Offshore Wind Farm project (Interview 5) and increased interest in supporting the supply and utilization of hydrogen as a part of its efforts to develop a low-carbon economy [D3]–[D6].

But such a situation has persisted for the past 25 years, so the private sector cannot really invest in updating this industrial sector further. If another policy comes in to support higher value for recycled materials in the market, then the private sector is ready to invest in them. (Interview 7)

5. Discussion

Kitakyushu Eco-Town represents a case of a city government-led green urban growth machine in the context of a mature developmental state. It is an outcome of an institutionally embedded green urban growth coalition, in which the national government played an enabling role through policy programs and legislation. Our interview data show that the local government assumed the role of an institutional entrepreneur and compensated for the lack of private capital by allocating municipal funds and securing other support from local and national sources to facilitate the creation of a branded cluster of recycling facilities. This actually reveals how Kitakyushu as an industrial city was able to utilize its legacy in terms of land, expertise, and capital while promoting the recycling industry as part of the greening of the local economy. Lee and Sonnenfeld [96] emphasize that “Kitakyushu Eco-Town thus illustrates how corporate motivations and resource strategies, aligned with local initiatives, can enable city-level industrial symbiosis,” from which they derive the idea that the local government has co-created the recycling industry in collaboration with corporate stakeholders. However, it is evident that symbiotic relationships within the industrial sector are still in their infancy—and even more so when considering the broader range of urban actors involved in urban symbiosis.

A critical task undertaken by the city government is stakeholder engagement [78,101]. While the collaborative relationship of the City of Kitakyushu and NSC, the most powerful industrial player in the area, was intensive in the early years of the industrial district’s development, the stakeholder network expanded significantly once the city government purchased a large portion of the land in the Hibikinada area. The city government was able to bridge the public–private divide and intensify its collaboration with SMEs ([99]; cf. [94]). It is worth emphasizing that the active involvement of civil society has served to balance the agenda, a prerequisite for achieving optimal results in the pursuit of a high quality of life and sustainable lifestyle (cf. [101]). The environmental movement had a notable local influence in the post-War decades, which was reflected in voluntary improvements by industries and anti-pollution agreements between city government and industrial companies [74,78]. Progressive environmental policies were filtered through the local politico-administrative machinery in a way that effectively created an alternative strategy to a one-dimensional growth machine logic (cf. [102]). The city government obviously succeeded in translating grassroots environmental activism into green industrial policy, as pointed out by Low [99]. Our results align with the findings of Irvine and Bai [76], who emphasize the importance of vertical and horizontal linkages behind the success of the development of Kitakyushu Eco-Town.

It seems that the more distant the rationale of the growth coalition is from the instrumental profit-maximization ethos of land and property owners and recycling businesses, the more delocalized and potentially politicized its agenda becomes, which implies a wider leeway in terms of industrial policy. When the local government becomes a key player in industrial development, it creates a “development proposal” to private enterprises, which predominantly revolves around industrial land, R&D subsidies, and the brand of the industrial district. In this way, the local government as an urban entrepreneur lays its cards on the table while giving the final say to private stakeholders. This is the essence of an institutionally embedded green growth machine. Even if profit motive is at the core of the involvement of private firms as members of the informal growth coalition and the corporate sector shapes the coalition through its own governance mechanisms (see, e.g., [103]), the city government’s open commitment to the development of an area together with public land ownership seems to balance the relational aspects of the growth machine. Moreover, the role of the local government evolves during the life cycle of the park, for in the inception phase of the Eco-Town project its role as a policymaker and a financier was critical, whereas after reaching a certain level of maturity, its role developed into that of a facilitator and supporter, which hints that the relationality in the governance of the park is dynamic, i.e., it develops gradually from an external to an internal focus (cf. [61]).

Our results give insights into refining some aspects of green urban growth machine theorization. First, the public sector must be given due consideration, especially in developed-country contexts. Second, as a continuation of the first point, the role of local government as an agenda-setter should not be underestimated. Third, the successful implementation of novel industrial policies depends crucially on stakeholder engagement involving the business community, the urban community, and the wider societal context. Lastly, the green growth machine is a manifestation of environmentally justified industrial policy intervention, which necessitates a balance between business and environmental interests. Theoretical implications of our findings for growth machine theory are highlighted in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Theorizing the governance of a green urban growth coalition.

The preceding discussion problematizes the foundational tenets of the urban growth machine thesis, which traditionally center on a rentier elite unified by an overarching obsession with economic growth and the maximization of land exchange values. This elite interest is pursued by manufacturing a local growth consensus and securing support from the local policymaking apparatus [23,24,25]. However, the emergence of the green urban growth coalition challenges this one-dimensional view. It demonstrates that democratically negotiated, progressive elements are now incorporated into the core dynamics of the growth coalition. This shift reflects the condition of late modern society, wherein growth strategies are increasingly subject to diverse normative frameworks, including environmentalism.

Regarding the four previously mentioned tenets, green urban growth machine theorization demonstrates that diverse pressures exist to supplement a one-dimensional growth ideology with environmental and social considerations. The ‘green’ dimension introduces an additional element into the role of land in urban development, which likely relativizes the focus on exchange value. Furthermore, it is not self-evident that a local parochial elite can create hegemony around growth ideology in the current politically diverse setting, nor is it clear that a democratic polity would automatically lean toward a growth coalition as opposed to anti-growth, green, welfare, or social forces. This does not entirely refute the growth machine thesis as an expression of capitalist tendencies in local development—especially since the evidence in this article rests on only a single case—but pinpoints anomalies that place its tenets in perspective and underscore the need to adapt them to contemporary urban dynamics.

The spatial and economic organization of local industrial development affects the growth machine dynamic. Namely, the case of the Eco-Town implies that industrial districts constitute a special kind of environment in terms of spatial, social, institutional, and industrial development. For example, there was no notable green gentrification in Eco-Town and surrounding areas due to the availability of reclaimed land. As regards local industries, Eco-Town, as a greenfield development, is largely separated from the traditional industry clusters of the city. The recycling industry cluster is actually a narrow slice of the entire industrial base of the city (cf. [51]). In the same vein, Eco-Town-driven industrial symbiosis as part of a wider circular urban-regional ecosystem rests on the stand-alone commercial recycling firms with small-scale inter-industry raw material exchanges and a few waste-to-energy ventures [96,104]. The Kitakyushu Eco-Town model is rather different when compared with, for example, Kawasaki Eco-Town, which, as a brownfield development, anchored its activities in the cluster of established heavy industries [99,105,106].

The city government of Kitakyushu has consistently been striving for economic growth, but not at the expense of the environment (cf. [19,46,49,50]). The aim was to transition to a circular economy, spearheaded by Eco-Town as a recycling industry hub. Assessing the environmental significance of this transition remains challenging, as the Eco-Town objectives were operationalized as instrumental mechanisms rather than as well-defined end targets supported by robust indicators. These objectives primarily revolved around promoting a comprehensive 3R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) system and reducing waste. Furthermore, despite the increasing maturity of the policy framework, it remained highly abstract, articulated primarily through concepts such as zero emissions and decarbonization [D2]. Ultimately, the Eco-Town project’s original core function was to advance the overarching environmental milestones chiefly through recycling.

Economically, the appeal of Eco-Town may have slightly diminished due to the heavy reliance on labor in recycling processes, uncertainties regarding the streams of recyclables, and narrow profit margins. These factors keep business interests modest within the green urban growth machine, which poses a challenge to its resilience (e.g., [79,96]). This situation calls for the renewal of a growth agenda that is able to attract diverse businesses and expand into international markets. In Kitakyushu, the focus started to change in the latter half of the 2000s, due to the commitment to local low-carbon development and the pursuit of becoming a zero-emission city—a goal officially announced by the city government in the early 2020s. While recycling exhibits growth prospects in clean technology, including solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, Kitakyushu’s current green growth strategy is oriented towards reducing carbon dioxide emissions from energy production, developing energy storage systems, and aspiring to become a hub for wind-power industries. This indicates a thematic shift in Kitakyushu’s green growth machine [D7]–[D8].

6. Conclusions

The Eco-Town project of the City of Kitakyushu is one of the most prominent cases of local economic restructuring in Japan built on the idea of a circular economy. The city government set up a recycling industrial park, which became a significant player at different territorial scales. Even if it was based on a local government initiative, it is governed in a collaborative and enabling fashion. In other words, the city government operates in a persuasive manner, which gives the private actors considerable leeway in their involvement. This is instrumental in securing a balanced consideration of public, private, and civic interests in the development of the recycling industrial complex.

The roles of key stakeholders have been discussed predominantly from the city government’s point of view and can be summarized as follows. By providing funding and reforming the regulatory framework, the national government created fruitful conditions for developing recycling industries. It provided legitimacy and public visibility for the Kitakyushu Eco-Town project. The city government’s reliance on vertical intergovernmental relations was critical in the early phase of Eco-Town development. Corporate roles evolved in two phases: in the first, corporations acted as private landowners and major industrial players, whereas later the focus shifted to small-scale recycling businesses. Civil society was a major transformative force in the period preceding the Eco-Town project, yet later it became a target of environmental awareness campaigns primarily. These remarks indicate that the relationalities of the green urban growth machine are highly dynamic. It appears that, at the outset of the coalition-building endeavor, local government is subject to local pressures while simultaneously seeking to attract external support for cluster formation, whereas at a later stage, its role shifts toward facilitating and coordinating targeted development efforts.

Our results show that the role of local government in establishing an institutionally embedded green urban growth machine can be decisive, prompting a reconsideration of selected aspects of the growth machine thesis and its assumptions about local development in mature developmental states. The greening of the growth machine may be an indication of a broader need to take current socio-economic realities into account when theorizing urban development under capitalism. As mentioned earlier, the city government acts as a key coalition-builder, whose impact is amplified when the national government supports locally initiated and embedded policies. This implies that institutional capacity matters in greening industrial policy (cf. [107]). At the same time, the formation of a green growth machine appears to be highly contingent on both local conditions and contextual relationships, suggesting that the success of the coalition depends on local leadership and a constellation of endogenous factors, as well as their interaction with exogenous factors ranging from national government policies to global economic and technological trends.

However, a distinct pitfall emerges within the green dimension of this case. Even the successful governance of explicitly green industrial restructuring through urban growth coalitions may remain devoid of tangible environmental benefits, despite pervasive sustainable branding. This constitutes perhaps the most contentious issue in the case of the Kitakyushu Eco-Town, where establishing recycling as the core profile of an industrial district may fall short of genuine green restructuring. At present, there is little empirical evidence to demonstrate that the Eco-Town has contributed to the attainment of significant environmental goals. While it may eventually become a vital actor in fostering an industrial–retail–urban symbiosis, such long-term developments remain purely speculative at this stage.

The limitations of this study relate to the reliance on a single case study methodology, which is used to highlight the contextual view of local government involvement in building a green growth coalition. It is also worth noting that our data are based on interviews with representatives of the city government and institutions that facilitate the greening of industrial development. This significantly narrows the perspective from which the greening of local industrial development is examined. Another limitation is that our study focuses more on coalition building and consolidating Eco-Town operations than on the strategic development of the Eco-Town area.

While the case of Japan serves our purposes well, this choice implies that our results are applicable primarily to a mature developmental state context. This reveals the need for future research regarding the capabilities and limitations of city and metropolitan governments and of inter-municipal collaboration in the building and functioning of green growth coalitions in various contexts, as exemplified by a cross-national comparative study of the differences in the formation and operation of urban green growth coalitions in Asia, Europe, and North America. There are also structural issues that vary depending on context. For example, demographic changes, especially in East Asia and many European countries, raise the question of how the effects of ageing, depopulation, and hollowing out condition green urban restructuring.

It would be interesting to broaden the perspective and gather data from actor groups that represent different institutional logics. Most notably, there is a need for research on power relations in coalition building as well as on various ways of harmonizing different interests and institutional logics while simultaneously guaranteeing that public interest is sufficiently taken into account in the growth-oriented industrial and urban development policies. Among the various stakeholder groups, a particularly interesting case is local civil society, and especially the question of how its capacity can affect the development of a green urban growth machine in postindustrial cities.